Professor Kenneth McConkey discusses Portrait of a Girl in White by Sir John Lavery to be offered on 01 October auction A Glasgow Legacy : Selected Paintings from the John Shaw Collection.
Fine Art
A Girl in White: Lavery’s Whistlerian Turn
9 September 2025
Kenneth McConkey
Returning to Glasgow from Paris at the end of 1884, John Lavery sensed a new optimism. He had left the city after years of economic depression following the collapse of the city bank. Renewed self-confidence was reflected in a cadre of collectors interested in acquiring modern art, several of whom quickly recognised his talent. At the same time, young painters of the nascent Glasgow School were curious about what he was doing, and within a year, press reporters were calling at his studio in order to inform readers on the work they might expect to see in forthcoming exhibitions. The Tennis Party, (Aberdeen Art Gallery) recently completed, and bound for the Royal Academy, was already being hailed as a masterpiece, while pictures such as Convalescence and The Intruders (both Private Collections) were to be expected at the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts exhibition opening in the first week of February 1886. Subject pictures like these in which talent was on display, might lead to lucrative portrait commissions. Lavery however, could not afford to wait for such bonuses and during the year he set other hares running. Mary, Queen of Scots after her defeat at the battle of Langside; Ariadne, lamenting the departure of Theseus from Naxos would be new subjects to tackle, when not engaged with scenes of modern life.
Patronage in the first instance came from Paisley, the town where Lavery had been living before his three years in France. William Mackean, its Lord Provost, along with its illustrious cotton kings - Smiley, Ker, Coats and Clark - was keen support the painter, and in one instance, that of James Fulton, to supply him with a cottage on his estate for the production of family portraits. At the same time, 160 Bath Street, Glasgow, close to the art club and surrounded by the likes of Edward Arthur Walton, James Guthrie and Macaulay Stevenson, remained his main studio address. Here sitters, like the young woman in the present canvas, would pose in a variety of evening and outdoor dresses. An early success with After the Dance in 1883, led to the watercolour, Au Bal in 1885, (both Private Collections) and the present revelation that even the most daring Paris fashions were available in the burgeoning ‘second city of the Empire’.
Lavery’s model appears before us in a dress, loosely modelled on one of the great couturier, Charles Frederick Worth’s creations. In the mid-1880s Worth sought to soften the rigid corsetry of the female torso with a soft chiffon fichu fixed with epaulet ribbons and derived from the court of Marie Antoinette a hundred years earlier. Seen in the artist’s contemporary Girl in a Fur Wrap this was complimented by long sheer elbow-length gloves, held in place with delicate bows, as in the present portrait.
It is tempting to associate the dress worn by Lavery’s young woman with that in Whistler’s Harmony in White and Ivory: Lady Colin Campbell (illustrated above) shown in its unfinished state at the Society of British Artists’ exhibition in the first week of December 1886 - a painting reputedly delayed for the dress to arrive from Worth’s sewing room in Paris. Had Lavery gone to London and seen this ‘harmony’ he would also have noted the work of former fellow-students such as George Percy Jacomb Hood whose Whistlerian formalism extended to the use ebonised Japoniste furniture (illustrated above). Such unusually wide chairs with two short ‘ladder’ backs, one intended as an arm rest, were currently fashionable.
Had Lavery seen Whistler’s painting and returned to Glasgow to paint his own ‘harmony in white and ivory’ in the present canvas, it would mark a significant realignment - one compounded in the following year with at least two trips to London, his own submissions to Whistler’s society, and a lengthy tutorial over numerous drinks in the bar of the Metropole Hotel, with the impressive American master. The British Artists’ winter exhibition of 1886 occurred at a crucial moment when the young artist was staging his first solo display of ‘some portraits, pictures and sketches painted in the neighbourhood’ in the Clark Hall in Paisley. As his first opportunity to see recent work together in one place, it was a watershed.
Cleverly cementing relationships with supporters, Lavery’s show locked them into his ongoing development, his future triumphs in London and Paris and the challenges he embraced with his ‘State Visit’ commission in 1888 and his encounters in North Africa in 1891. While a whistle-stop London visit at the end of 1886 remains to be confirmed, there can be no doubt that Portrait of a Girl in White marks the point at which Aestheticism emerges as an important aspect of Lavery practice. It is thus a painting of some significance and one likely to have been exhibited early in the following year.
SIR JOHN LAVERY R.A., R.S.A., R.H.A., P.R.P., H.R.O.I., L.L.B. (IRISH 1856-1941)
PORTRAIT OF A GIRL IN WHITE
Signed and dated 1886 to a canvas fragment on the stretcher, oil on canvas
76cm x 63.5cm (30in x 25in)
£4,000 - 6,000
Exhibited:
London, New English Art Club, 1887 as Portrait of a Girl in White (no 69?)
With this in mind, further consideration needs to be given to its reduction in size (see note 1). Inspection of the reverse of the unlined canvas reveals a film of discolouration, consonant with its age. A cleaner vertical band of canvas, presently off-centre, tells us the position of the original central stretcher bar, indicating that more canvas was removed on the right of the painted surface than on the left. With this in mind, we must assume that the painting originally contained the sitter’s knee and the fall of her dress to the floor.
In the early months of 1887 and following the showing of The Tennis Party, Lavery remained preoccupied by events in London. In addition to the Society of British Artists, having heard about the young Paris-trained radicals of newly formed New English Art Club, he, Walton, George Henry, Thomas Millie Dow and others in the Glasgow contingent wished to send their work to an exhibition of the like-minded, that contained paintings by Clausen, Sargent, Steer and Tuke. One of Lavery’s entries at the club’s second exhibition, Portrait of a Girl in White, has long remained untraced. It can now be proposed that the missing canvas has been found.
While Sargent’s large Portrait of Lady (Mrs Cecil Wade, 1886, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, USA) in a white dress was felt to occupy ‘more space than its merits warrant’, the same was not to be said of a ‘life-size portrait of a girl in white (69) by J Lavery, on a light background’. No other portrait by Lavery of the period, quite matches this description, so at least, pro tem, it seems logical to suppose that the present canvas, in its original uncut form, was that submitted to the new society. What remains however, in the captivating gaze of this unnamed sitter and the confident handling of costume and accessories is all the rigorous discipline of the ‘square-brush’ Naturalism associated with the followers of Bastien-Lepage, albeit modified by pale Whistlerian harmonies of white and ivory.
ILLUSTRATED
Fig 1 James McNeill Whistler, Harmony in White and Ivory: Lady Colin Campbell, 1886, presumed destroyed. Image: Archives of the Whistler Paintings Project, Glasgow University Library
Fig 2 Sir John Lavery R.A., R.S.A., R.H.A., P.R.P., H.R.O.I., L.L.B. (Irish 1856-1941) Portrait of a Girl in White
Fig 3 George Percy Jacomb Hood, My Sister, 1886 Image: Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
FOOTNOTES
1 Recent examination of Portrait of a Young Lady reveals clear evidence of reduction in size of approximately 6 inches on the right side with smaller amounts at top and left. It is likely that an even greater amount was removed from the lower third of the picture (see below). The remaining canvas was then applied to present the smaller stretcher, on which the original signature and date has been preserved. This is likely to have occurred within a few decades after the canvas left Lavery’s studio and possibly when the painting was being taken to Canada. The painting is unlined and otherwise in a good state of preservation.
2 The City of Glasgow Bank went into liquidation in October 1878, ruining the city and most of its shareholders, and leaving a credit squeeze on business that lasted for four years. Lavery left for Paris in November 1881.
3 See for instance, Fiat Justitia, ‘Lights and Shadows’, Quiz, 8 January 1886, p. 178.
4 Kenneth McConkey, Lavery on Location, 2003 (exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Ireland), pp. 66-7.
5 For a fuller account of the Fulton/Lavery legacy to Paisley Art Institute, see A Taste for Art, Selected Works from the Paisley Art Institute Collection, 26 September 2024, (sale catalogue, Lyon and Turnbull, Edinburgh, entries by Kenneth McConkey), pp. 66-73; also, idem, John Lavery, A Painter and his World, 2010 (Atelier Books), p. 31-2, 37.
6 An Evening Study (formerly Girl in a fur Wrap) was shown at the Dunfermline Fine Art Association exhibition in December 1886; see Fifeshire Advertiser, 4 December 1886, p. 2. Although hair colouring and lighting is dramatically different, it is likely that for this and the present canvas, the same model was used.
7 For Whistler’s Harmony in White and Ivory: Lady Colin Campbell, see image above.
8 For Hood’s recollection of Lavery at the atelier Julian, see McConkey 2010, p. 17. For Whistler and Hood in 1886, see Frederick Wedmore, ‘Fine Art: The Society of British Artists’, The Academy, 4 December 1886, p. 385.
9 The chair in the present portrait, or similar, reappears in a number of other works, including La Jeune Parisienne, 1887 and Finale, c. 1887 (both Private Collections), while the model’s dress may be the same as that in Portrait Interior with Oriental Screen (sold Adam’s, Dublin, 26 March 2025).
10 For a fuller survey of the contents of the club’s second exhibition see Kenneth McConkey, The New English, A History of the New English Art Club, 2006 (Royal Academy Publications), pp. 37-42.
11 ‘Exhibition of Pictures at the New English Art Club’, The Building News, 8 April 1887, p. 504.
12 Lepage had of course painted his own ‘white-on-white’ seated portrait, La première communiante, 1875 (Musée des Beaux Arts, Tournai).