Summer's big exhibition is an evocative blockbuster of a lost era

Until october 27, 

Four stars

A Belfast-born Glasgow Boy whose life was as eventful as his paintings are sedate, Sir John Lavery fills the National’s blockbuster summer festival slot with a sprawling exhibition which has travel at its heart. But travel of the sort wealthy people undertook either side of the First World War – on ocean liners and sleeper carriages, to places like Cannes, Palm Beach and New York, there to dress in crisp white cotton and languish in dappled shade.

But away from the Merchant Ivory vibe, in the show’s margins, are other subjects which show the breadth of Lavery’s interests and the diversity of his subject matter. That war itself features heavily but there’s also tennis. Lots of it. The game was pacey, dramatic, prettily costumed and modern, all things which appealed to Lavery.

And of course there’s Scotland, and Glasgow in particular. A section devoted to Lavery’s work at the 1888 Glasgow International Exhibition, where he was given a brief as a sort of roving artist-in-residence, is both fascinating and instructive. Fascinating because of the lustrous paintings and fascinating because it’s hard not to thrill at the brio of a city which could build such a palace of wonders – then just rip it all down and move on. Did Glasgow’s gallus spirit fuel Lavery himself?

Sir John Lavery, On the Cliffs, 1911. Photograph courtesy of the Richard Green Gallery, London (Image: free)

The first room gives a timeline running from the artist’s birth in 1856 to his death in the Irish Free State in 1941, and sets out the landmark peregrinations most relevant to the show’s themes. His years in Glasgow. His time in Paris and at the nearby artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, where near contemporary Robert Louis Stevenson had also settled for a while. His departure for London for good in 1896, and his purchase of a villa near Tangier in Morocco a decade later.

There’s also a film in which the show’s curators talk about his life and work, and set him in the context of the artistic movements shaping tastes in painting and criticism in France and the UK at the time.

The first actual painting the visitor encounters is a large portrait of a man resting his elbow on the back of an ornate wicker chair on which sits a young girl. He is relaxed, solid, self-assured and whimsical looking. She is pretty, dark and intense, and stares directly at the viewer. This is Lavery himself and Eileen, his daughter by first wife Kathleen MacDermott, who died in 1891.

Lavery would go on to marry wealthy Irish-American beauty and celebrated hostess Helen Martyn. She also had a daughter by a previous marriage, Alice, and both girls would join their parents on their travels, later joined by Eileen’s travel companion, Mary Auras. Glamorous and German, Mary features in many of Lavery’s paintings including one of the most striking here, a portrait of her under a parasol.

Eileen, for the record, would grow up to wed an Eton-educated Scottish peer who spied for the Japanese in the 1920s, displayed fascist sympathies a decade later and then became a druid. Keep the lot of them in mind as you wander the cavernous rooms of the National. Better still, keep them at your elbow as sort of spirit guides.

The themed rooms run us from Lavery’s time in France (muted greens and browns, strange letterbox-shaped canvases) to his earlier work in Glasgow (dark, rich, sombre, almost tobacco-stained) to his travels in Spain and beyond.

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Here he is in New York in 1926, painting Central Park in the late autumn sunshine from his suite in the Plaza Hotel. Here he is in Switzerland two years earlier, climbing high (much against doctor’s orders) to capture the December twilight over Lake Geneva and the snowy mountains beyond.

And here he is in Morocco, again and again, obsessively returning to the view across the straits to southern Spain. It’s no surprise really: the horizon cuts neatly across and the light, as he meets it with his brush and his eye, is marvellous, a confection of hazy pinks, blues and greys.

Here and there are dabs of colour in the foreground, but it’s only Helen and Alice, dressed (probably) in the latest Paris fashions. The titles of these works say it all: Tangier Bay, Sunshine is one, Where The Sirocco Blows another. Not that Lavery ignored Tangier itself. One work shows the city in its blinding mid-day whiteness, another at dusk, those pinks and grays still present but now more muted.

As well as a painter’s eye for composition and light, Lavery had a photographer’s love for capturing drama. In his early career he even worked as a photographer’s assistant in Glasgow. Those two talents don’t combine in every work presented across the five rooms, but they’re evident in the ones in which he attempts to capture movement. Those paintings of tennis players, for example, or a Good Friday procession in a small town in the Basque Country, as viewed from the balcony of his hotel (doubtless not as plush as the Plaza).

Or the extraordinary painting in which he captures an aerial dogfight over London from the window of his home. This was on July 7 1917, when a raid by 20 or so German Gotha bombers killed 57 people. That work is in the final room ,which displays some of Lavery’s output during his stint as a war artist.

He was pushing 60 at the time, so he didn’t get near the front, but the work is still affecting. Now the ships bobbing at anchor off the yellow beaches are naval frigates and corvettes. In the blue skies are planes, in the night skies searchlights and tracer fire from anti-aircraft batteries. The green hills are still present, still majestic, but in the foreground now are row upon row of rudimentary wooden crosses.

And here you’ll find one of the largest paintings in the exhibition, a kilted Scottish soldier being tended to by a nurse in a London hospital filled with war wounded in various states of distress. It’s a sobering end to an exhibition which is so much about stillness, tranquillity and light.