Lot 131
Estimate: £20,000 - £30,000
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Auction: Evening Sale | Lots 103-196 | Thursday 05 December from 6pm
Signed, indistinctly inscribed ‘Dora’ verso, oil on canvas, framed as tondo
48.3cm x 48.3cm (19in x 19 in)
Purchased by the previous owner’s grandfather whilst living in North America and thence by descent;
Reeman Dansie Auctioneers, Colchester, 10 November 2021 (as Portrait of a Lady, Dora Little), where acquired by the previous owner;
Private Collection, London.
Exhibited:
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Sixteenth Carnegie International Exhibition, 1912, no.201;
Art Institute of Chicago, Paintings by John Lavery, 1912, no.31.
When he penned his article on Lavery’s work for L’Art et Les Artistes in 1905, the French critic, Camille Mauclair, famously dubbed the painter a ‘feminist before all’ – avant tout un feministe.[1]
During the Third Republic, a male admirer of women could so be described.
For such a connoisseur, a painter’s task was simply to idealize his muse in the creation of a masterpiece that would enthral the viewer. The objectification of women in this way was thus a social norm. One that was systematically pursued since the age of George Romney, and persisting until the emergence of current feminist theory in the 1970s.[2]
The early twentieth century art critic, however, approached his topic with good authority, for the Irish painter was in the news. Within four years of the purchase by the French government of Père et fille 1897-1900 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), a second painting, Printemps, (fig 1) had been acquired for its modern collection.[3]
This was unprecedented. To have one work by a contemporary Irish artist was unusual enough, but to have two signified a pre-eminence that applied to no other painter working in the British Isles.[4] Lavery was ‘Anglais’, of course, and with works in major European national collections in Germany, Belgium and Italy, his reputation went before him. Already a Salon star, throughout the 1890s he had been universally honoured, winning the first gold medal awarded by the Carnegie Institute’s Jury of Award at Pittsburgh in 1896. His subject in the recent French purchase, the personification of spring, shows a young woman who wears a straw hat, ribboned and plumed, according to current fashion, and in itself an expression of the anglomanie that accompanied the entente cordiale between Britain and France in 1904.[5]
In visual terms, the phenomenon - the representation of ‘Fair Women’ - had gathered force and become the theme for occasional exhibitions from the 1890s onwards in Britain, where, as in France, most artists were men and ‘beauty’ was the province of women. Lavery had been drawn into this trend when one of the first such shows was organized by his Glasgow dealer, Thomas Lawrie, in 1893, and he capitalized on the growing modern sense of celebrity around the famous faces of actresses, dancers and concert performers. The ‘Fair Women’ idea moved to the Grafton Galleries, London, in the following year in a hugely popular historic survey exhibition that effectively consolidated the ongoing revival of British eighteenth century portraiture and Romney in particular (fig 2).[6] On the back of this surge of interest, tondos and oval cameos of beautiful women returned to fashion in the Edwardian years. Such precedents appealed to Lavery. They enabled the intimate close-up form of address we see in Dora (fig 3).[7]
Accessories, the flowers of Printemps, were excluded, and colour, in dress and hat, was harmonized in Whistlerian terms, drawing the eye to the face of the sitter. Identity in such cases, was often a complex issue, and many of Lavery’s recent ‘fair women’ models of the period – ‘Phyllis’ or ‘Betty’ for instance – may always remain obscure, emphasising their essential purpose to convey the sense that beauty was not attached to social role or inherited wealth, so much as in the way someone presents themselves, in a form of address that charms the eye of the beholder. Reading a characteristic stance, the way someone sits, or a facial expression are among the essences of great painting, and Dora’s impassivity leaves us guessing. The face, its character, shape and form, fixing the gaze of the viewer, was much more important than a name, and as here, engagement is direct and penetrating. Is she inscrutable or provocative? Lavery asks these questions with tubes of coloured paste and a piece of fabric. The rest is métier.
When Dora was dispatched to Pittsburgh in 1912, Lavery’s work had recently been featured at the Venice Biennale, and he had, after outcries in the press, been finally admitted to membership of the Royal Academy.[8] The thirty-six paintings representing the best of his work and including both French government purchases, were allocated a separate gallery in the Carnegie Institute International Exhibition. The display had been being solicited for several years, since the acquisition of his The Bridge at Grez in 1899.[9] Thus, covering nearly thirty highly productive years, the works made a ‘most excellent’ introduction to the year’s survey of contemporary painting and demonstrated ‘versatility as well as the soundness of Lavery’s art’. By the time this assessment was made the exhibition had closed and Dora, along with its illustrious peers was travelling to Chicago, carrying with it the painter’s ‘well merited … distinction’.[10]
[1] Camille Mauclair, ‘John Lavery’, L’Art et Les Artistes, 1905, tome 2, p. 7.
[2] See for instance, Roy Strong introd., The Masque of Beauty, 1972 (exhibition catalogue, National Portrait Gallery, London) for a useful, but ‘of its time’ survey, that coincides with John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) and the idea of ‘the gaze’, taken up by Laura Mulvey and others.
[3] Père et fille, the first French state purchase for its modern collection at the Musée du Luxembourg, occurred in 1900. For further reference see Kenneth McConkey, John Lavery, A Painter and his World, 2010 (Atelier Books, Edinburgh), pp. 71-3, 85-8.
[4] George Frederick Watts, who died in 1904, aged 87, from an older generation, was the only exception.
[5] A frisson for those ‘in the know’ was that this flower of Englishness was actually Lavery’s German model, Mary Auras.
[6] Following Lawrie’s exhibition, the ‘Fair Women’ idea, based on Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Dream of Fair Women’, was taken up by the Grafton Galleries, London in 1894; see William Sharp, Fair Women in Painting and Poetry, 1894 (‘Portfolio Monograph’, Seeley & Co).
[7] Although it appears not to have been exhibited until 1912, Dora may well have been painted up to five years earlier.
[8] McConkey 2010, pp. 107-8.
[9] Kenneth McConkey, Lavery. On Location, 2023 (exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), pp. 36-7, 212.
[10] LM, ‘The Carnegie Institute’s Exhibition: The Foreign Paintings’, Art and Progress, vol 3, no 10, August 1912, p. 682; James B Townsend, ‘Annual Carnegie Display’, American Art News, vol X no 29, 27 April 1912, p. 4. Press cuttings for the International Exhibition in 1912 appear not to have survived in the museum records transferred to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.