Fine Art

John Lavery at Glenfield House, Paisley

11 May 2026

Professor Kenneth McConkey

Once upon a time the path from a country house led down along the side of a pond where a young woman was spotted by a painter, working quietly on a small canvas.

The sun was shining as she opened her parasol and before she passed him, he had placed her in his picture close to the little jetty, to which a rowing boat was tied. The scene is one to delight a French Impressionist, were it not for the fact that the baronial pile up on the bank in the background, Glenfield House, places the incident precisely on the outskirts of Paisley, the ‘cottonopolis’ of the west of Scotland (figs 1 & 2).¹

Here the artist, John Lavery, was being patronized by local industrialists of great wealth. One in particular, James Fulton, whose family inherited the house along with their textile dyeing and finishing works, was one of biggest employers in the town, and was now, in 1886, affording the artist a residency.²

Illustrated: The Glen, Paisley, Postcard c. 1910, at http://paisleyonline.co.uk/html/this_old_house

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Born in Belfast and orphaned at the age of three, Lavery’s start in life had been inauspicious. Brought up by relatives in Ulster and the west of Scotland, his career began as a photographer’s assistant, while learning to draw in classes for working men at the Haldane Academy, part of Glasgow School of Art.

Times were nevertheless hard. Following the collapse of the city bank in 1878 poverty was widespread and Lavery was struggling to make ends meet. Seeking further training and his fortune, he left for Paris in 1881. During his absence the seeds of economic recovery began to bear fruit and Lavery’s successes in France had gone before him. Friendship with the Fultons began within months of his return at the end of 1884, with the mill-owner offering the painter a cottage adjacent to the present pond to act as his studio while he painted the portraits of his daughters, Alice and Eva, (Paisley Museum Collection), and other works in the district.³

Quite evidently Lavery delighted in the setting and although a checklist has not survived, it is safe to assume that being painted ‘in the neighbourhood’ this canvas, A Summer Afternoon, and other works such as Waterfall, The Glen, Paisley would have been displayed in his first solo exhibition at the end of the year.⁴

Now sadly demolished, the house had been built by the Fulton brothers’ grandfather in 1859. My thanks are due to Victoria Irvine and Michael Durning for their invaluable work on Lavery’s contacts with the Fulton family. Fulton’s factory lay at the bottom of the hill and was served in its dying processes by soft rainwater held uphill in three ponds – really three small dams. The present pond was drained and filled-in during the twentieth century.

The cottage originally stood on the slope, off to the left of the present work. On early maps it was originally marked as ‘Burn Crook’, but later became known as ‘Lavery Cottage’. During these years Lavery also maintained a studio in St Vincent Street, Glasgow, in what might be described as the artist’s quarter, in close proximity to Glasgow Art Club, of which he was a member. While making use of the cottage, Lavery retained his studio at 101 St Vincent Street in the centre of Glasgow.

Suave, self-confident, painted en plein air and spontaneously composed, the present work demonstrates a maturity found elsewhere in more ambitious canvases such as the celebrated Tennis Party, 1885 (Aberdeen Art Gallery). Few works can so accurately be placed in time and space, when a valuable social historical record becomes a moment of aesthetic delight.

Heading up the hill into the Gleniffer Braes, to the south of Paisley, the artist stroller observes a young woman under a parasol, reading a book. She looks up as he approaches. Beyond her, where the red earthen path reaches the hill crest, the gorse is in flower.

Aware of the dialogue between the Naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage and the Impressionism of Claude Monet, by the time of his return to Scotland Lavery had seen that modern French artists were breaking the landscape into prismatic taches. These he observed in the broken foreground colours of tufts and hollows under foot on the Gleniffer slopes. The lush chrome greens in foreground grasses drop to paler, warmer hues at the brow of the hill and are intensified by a backdrop film of cobalt blue. Colour sensations were vivid on such a day when one can smell the vegetation and feel the heat.

Although essentially a private domain, the Fultons threw open the braes as an area where all the people of Paisley could roam freely, on high days and holidays. They provided the perfect venue for annual free ‘Glen Concerts’ at which, in the following year, Lavery was photographed recording the scene¹

On quieter days, as here, members of the Fulton clan and their staff would make use of the braes for recreational purposes. The present study is likely, with The Pond at the Glen, Paisley, to have been one of those included in the painter’s first solo exhibition in the Clark Hall, in November 1886 (see lot 124). The perfect expression of this peaceful haunt is Lavery’s A Summer Afternoon, 1886.

We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for writing this catalogue entry.

^{1. See}^here^{for Lavery’s sketch of The Glen Concert.. The annual Glen Concerts, inaugurated in 1874, were established to raise money for good causes, and for the erection of statues to Robert Burns and the Paisley weaver poet, Robert Tannahill. The poetry of Tannahill and Burns was read on these occasions, to the accompaniment of a 400-voice choir and military bands singing and playing favourite Scottish airs.Attendance was reckoned to average between 20,000 and 30,000, and Nationalist sentiment prevailed.}

Artists

John Lavery

British 1856 - 1941

Department