SIR JOHN LAVERY, R.A., R.S.A., R.H.A. (IRISH 1856-1941) ‡
‘SHIRLEY TEMPLE AND THE PAINTER’
£28,750
Auction: 7 September 2012 at 15:00 BST
Description
signed lower right J LAVERY, oil on canvas
Dimensions
104 x 58cm (41 x 22¾in)
Footnote
Provenance:
The Artist; by descent; sold Christie's April 1949 [1]; Private Collection, Glasgow, by family descent; William Hardie Ltd, Glasgow
Exhibited:
Dundee, Victoria Art Galleries, Exhibition of Paintings by Sir John Lavery Kt., RA, RSA, September 1936, no 23
London, Royal Society of Portrait Painters, November 1936
Manchester, Platt Hall, Royal Society of Modern Painters, 1937
Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, 1939, no. 146
London, Leicester Galleries, Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Sir John Lavery, RA, 1941, no. 34 (illus in catalogue)
Glasgow, The Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, The Glasgow Boys, 1990, no 24
Literature:
'Court Circular', The Manchester Guardian, 16 May 1936, p. 12
'Artist and Actress', The Manchester Guardian, 17 November 1936, p. 14 (illus)
'The Royal Society of Portrait Painters', The Manchester Guardian, 19 November 1936, p. 7
Anon, 'The Royal Society of Portrait Painters', The Times, 21 November 1936, p. 15
The Sunday Times, 22 November 1936
The Ottawa Evening Citizen, 30 November 1936, p. 15 (illus)
'In Manchester', The Manchester Guardian, 12 May 1937, p. 13
John Lavery, The Life of a Painter, 1940 (Cassell and Co), p. 156, 239, illus, n.p. [plate 53]
'A Memorial Lavery Exhibition', The Manchester Guardian, 3 April 1941, p. 4
Kenneth McConkey, Sir John Lavery, 1993 (Canongate), p. 196, illus
Kenneth McConkey, John Lavery, A Painter and his World, 2010, (Atelier Books), p. 198-9, illus
Note:
Following the death of her mother in July 1935, Sir John Lavery's teenage granddaughter, Ann Forbes-Sempill came to live with him at 5 Cromwell Place, South Kensington.[2] She was an avid moviegoer and her enthusiastic chatter about the latest releases filled a house that was cloaked in sadness. As a result, the painter, approaching his eightieth birthday and having completed his pictures for the forthcoming Royal Academy exhibition, now conceived a new project; he would go to Hollywood, gatecrash the studios and paint the stars.[3] He set sail on 2 January 1936, accompanied by his stepdaughter, Alice McEnery, and her husband, for the first leg of the journey to New York. To his great surprise, he discovered a friend in Hollywood who invited him to lunch at Paramount Studios. Her name was Alison Skipworth, an actress who he had painted as a young woman forty years earlier in Glasgow.[4] Various introductions were made but when Lavery appeared with his sketching easel amidst the chaos of 'Directors, Producers, scenario-writers, dozens of cameramen, sound-recorders, scene-shifters, not to speak of actors and actresses, stand-ins and extras', he quickly realized the impossibility of working in such an environment.[5] The same was true of the MGM lots where they were shooting 'Romeo and Juliet' with Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer in the title roles. Although he made some rapid sketches, it was clear that nothing more substantial than a series of slight sketches would be possible.
Lavery had more success outside the studios when he painted a small canvas entitled 'Stars in Sunlight' (City of Limerick Art Gallery) showing Maureen O'Sullivan and Loretta Young resting in a garden between takes, but there was nothing of the 'tinsel town' glamour in the picture.[6] His luck changed however when he encountered Shirley Temple, at that point the most 'bankable' star in the 'dream factory'.
Having begun her film career at the age of four in 1932, Temple achieved international fame two years later when 'Bright Eyes', in which she sang 'On the Good Ship Lollipop', was released.[7] At this stage she was under contract to Twentieth Century Fox for four films a year and Darryl F Zanuck, the studio head, had appointed a team of writers to develop new scripts for her.[8] These were mostly 'feel-good' musical comedies in which the child ingénue would effectively melt the hearts of the more niggardly adult characters and raise the spirits of the downtrodden. In thirties America, where Roosevelt's 'New Deal' was often criticised for its bureaucratic excesses, Temple's innocence effectively lifted the national depression. Roosevelt even declared that it was 'a splendid thing that for just fifteen cents an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles'.[9]
Shortly after his arrival in Hollywood Lavery let it be known that he was interested in painting Temple's portrait. This was a painter who had addressed great occasions, heads of state, political leaders, sportsmen, clerics, the rich and famous, and he had many successful child portraits to his name. Now in his declining years he would defy the critics and those like Clementine Churchill who felt that after the death of his wife, Hazel Lavery, his career was finished.[10] Sittings took place at his hotel in Palm Springs and her arrival caused a stir - as the painter told a reporter, 'a young girl brought groups of children to see the juvenile star, charging them a dime a head' when she was posing.[11] This sparkling personality, he would later recall, had perfect manners. Commenting on how forward American children could be, he described Temple as '... very different from that type of American child',
…in her there is no sign of anything other than innocent childhood allied to the most perfect manners - others addressed me as "Sir Lavery", she, invariably, as "Sir John". I could see from her parents where her intelligence came from.[12]
Far from presenting Temple in a conventional portrait format, Lavery opted to show her in full-length, holding a croquet mallet, a game she famously played with Orson Welles and Gary Cooper, and that matched her tomboyish character.
It also chimed with an artist who in 1890 had painted one of the few modern depictions of the game.[13] However, the novel feature to be added to the composition was the painter himself, stepping out from behind the canvas to introduce himself to the child. It was to be Lavery's last self-portrait, and it reveals the aged artist, fashionably attired in two-tone shoes, white flannels and dove-grey jacket. Only his butterfly collar and side-whiskers allude to an older Pickwickian persona. He leans forward, his model looks up and an exchange ensues. A reviewer described the double portrait as that of,
... the painter, palette and brushes in hand, succumbing to the precocious charms of Miss Shirley Temple. Sir John's gracious bow and the suggestion that he is backing out of the picture to give place to youth make rather a disturbing allegory.[14]
It is nevertheless unlikely that Lavery saw the picture as a 'disturbing allegory' - beyond the general reflections on 'youth and age' that had accompanied his Père et Fille, 1898-1900. The comparison here is apposite, in as much as both canvases reveal the artist's natural sympathy for all ages and conditions. Yet in very few instances does he cross the footlights and reveal himself in direct exchange with his subject . The Sunday Times critic summed this up by saying,
'In all his long and honourable career I do not think Lavery has ever given us a picture of greater charm and technical suavity.'[15]
Having first indicated that it would be submitted to the Royal Academy the following year, Lavery decided to send the picture immediately to his retrospective exhibition at Dundee in September 1936, before showing it in London at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, of which he was President. On this occasion he was photographed unveiling the double portrait and within days the press pictures were reproduced as far afield as Ottawa. [16]
However, eighteen months later, fortunes had begun to change and after the completion of 'Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm', Temple's career went into decline. Hackneyed story-lines and Zanuck's refusal to 'loan' her to MGM for 'The Wizard of Oz' led her parents to send her to school for a year in 1940 and when she returned as a teenager, America was in the war and the national mood had changed. Arguably this turn in her career was presaged by indifferent reviews in Britain where her talents were much more appreciated than her scripts. When, in February 1937, C.A. Lejeune, the film critic of The Observer, polled his readers for 'the most hated thing in pictures' she came top of the list.[17] Temple's eclipse did not apply to Lavery's final years. He would go on to paint the Duveens in their Fifth Avenue apartment, the coronation of 1937, the poet-laureate, John Masefield, and the ravishing society hostess, Viscountess Wimborne. In 1941, at the time of his death, having gone to his step-daughter in Ireland to escape the Blitz, he was working on a picture of a gypsy encampment, and, with the tributes, came the profound realization that a great tradition of portrait painting, stretching back through Sargent and Whistler to Manet and Velazquez, had ended. But five years earlier in Palm Springs, faced with the darling of the silver screen, there had been a splendid closing coup de dé.
Lyon & Turnbull are grateful to Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.
[1] Shirley Temple and the Painter was part of the division of studio contents which followed Lavery's death in 1941. One of his legatees, June Forbes-Sempill, was killed in the war and pictures from her portion of the estate were passed to her father, Lord Sempill. It was then sold at Christie's in April 1949.
[2] Lavery's wife, Hazel, died in January 1935 and in July of that year, his only daughter, Eileen Forbes-Sempill also died; See McConkey 2010, pp. 192-195.
[3] One evening a few years earlier he had seen a movie crew on location outside Buckingham Palace and thought it an excellent subject.
[4] Alison Skipworth had worked as a 'paintress' on the Doulton stand during the Glasgow International Exhibition in 1888, where the young Lavery had sketched her.
[5] John Lavery, The Life of a Painter, 1940 (Cassell), p. 240; quoted in McConkey, 2010, p. 198.
[6] McConkey, 2010, p. 199 illus.
[7] Anne Edwards, Shirley Temple, American Princess, 1988 (William Morrow and Co.), pp. 26-34.
[8] Not only was she supplied with her own bodyguard, but a bungalow was constructed at Fox studios for her and her parents.
[9] Ibid, p. 75-6. Late in 1935 the Roosevelts held a reception at the White House for Shirley Temple.
[10] McConkey, 2010, p. 194.
[11] 'Court Circular', The Manchester Guardian, 16 May 1936, p. 12
[12] John Lavery, The Life of a Painter, 1940 (Cassell and Co), p. 239
[13] McConkey, 2010, pp. 51-2.
[14] 'The Royal Society of Portrait Painters', The Manchester Guardian, 19 November 1936, p. 7
[15] The Sunday Times, 22 November 1936; quoted in McConkey 2010, p. 198.
[16] The Ottawa Evening Citizen, 30 November 1936, p. 15; see also 'Artist and Actress', The Manchester Guardian, 17 November 1936, p. 14.
[17] CA Lejeune, 'Films of the Week - The Holocaust', The Observer, 21 February 1937, p. 14. This predates Graham Greene's assault on the young star and her 'middle-aged men and clergymen' admirers, for which he was successfully sued; see Edwards, 1988, p. 105.