Fine Art

Sir John Lavery | Capturing A Moment On Canvas

13 September 2024

Sir John Lavery was a master of capturing the essence of a moment on canvas, this September, A Taste for Art : Selected Works from the Paisley Art Institute Collection presents four major paintings by this turn-of-the-century art titan.

The Belfast-born artist lived and worked in Paisley in the 1880s, with his first solo show being held in Paisley Town Hall in November 1886. Known today as a leading member of the group known as The Glasgow Boys, his considerable achievements are currently being celebrated by a landmark exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland.

A Taste for Art : Selected Works from the Paisley Art Institute Collection

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Waterfall, The Glen

During 1884, the last of his student years in France, John Lavery was keen to prepare for a triumphant return to Scotland, sending recent works to exhibitions in Paisley, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Kilmarnock. His continental mannerisms brought him to the attention of collectors and fellow painters alike, and among these was Joseph Fulton, co-owner of a large cloth scouring, finishing and dyeing works, inherited from his grandfather. The family was one of Paisley’s biggest employers. The Fultons lived in some style at Glenfield House, a baronial mansion built in 1859, on an estate overlooking the town. There, three small dams were constructed to supply soft water to the family firm from burns that flowed from the nearby Gleniffer Braes. The mill-owner offered Lavery a cottage adjacent to one of these ponds, close to the house, to act as his studio while he painted the portraits of his daughters (Paisley Museum), and other works in the district.[1]

These included scenes in the Paisley suburbs and views of the braes, including the Craigielinn waterfall, the subject of the present work. The Parasol (Private Collection), a watercolour of 1885 indicates that the artist was already familiar with the woodland paths leading to the site.[2]

Lot 65

WATERFALL, THE GLEN

Signed and dated 1886, oil on canvas

61cm x 46cm (24in x 18in)

£70,000 - £100,000 + fees

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Lavery was no stranger to such an environment. Many recent canvases had been executed en plein air in the forest of Fontainebleau, within walking distance of his hotel at Grez-sur-Loing. One of these was even inscribed as an ‘Impression’, indicating his awareness of the work of the French Impressionists.[3] However, Lavery’s malleable approach to handling also embraced possibilities he found in the work of Bastien-Lepage. Specifically, this alluded first and foremost to massing the essential shapes and forms of the composition, adroitly placing the figure as a focal point for the beholder’s eye, and mapping colour and tone transitions, before attending to detail. These essential tenets derived from modern French ‘Naturalism’ are evident in the Waterfall: The Glen composition.

Even today, after nearly 140 years, one can see that Lavery was faithful to the setting. Back then, crystal pure tumbling waterfalls, sometimes incorporating a female bather, had been used to symbolise the source of human life – as in Gustave Courbet’s La Source 1868 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Lavery’s female figure, picking her steps down the ravine, carries none of this allegory. She is simply there, before us, as we turn a corner. Muse? Motif? Or chance encounter? She gives scale to this fold in the terrain with its sounding cataract.

LOT 66

THE GLEN CONCERT

Signed and inscribed ‘James Fulton from J. Lavery’, oil on canvas

46cm x 36cm (18in x 14in)

£30,000 - £50,000 + fees

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The Glen Concert

Although essentially a private estate, the Fultons treated the Gleniffer braes to the south of the town as an area where all the people of Paisley could roam freely, with their backs to the symbols of toil. The perfect expression of this peaceful recreational haunt is Lavery’s A Summer Afternoon, 1886.

One annual occasion disrupted the natural harmony of the braes, replacing quiet reverie with hubbub and birdsong with a massed choir. 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. Attendance was reckoned to average between 20,000 and 30,000, for whom a four-hundred-voice choir sang favourite Scottish airs. Lavery turned out for the event in 1887 and a photograph shows him working on what is probably the present canvas.

The Glen Concert is a work of great significance in the Lavery oeuvre. In the years to come he would frequently adopt the role of ‘man in the crowd’, to record a race meeting, bullfight, military parade, or busy Moroccan marketplace. In such situations he had the ability to shut out all distracting antics. Here, with its remarkable fluidity, in which grassy slopes are covered by hordes of spectators, enlivened by one or two tiny touches of vermillion banners, the green hillsides of the glen are cast into a remarkable relief. The mottled landscape is almost an exercise in abstraction as, undeterred by onlookers, Lavery’s formidable powers of concentration are on public display.

LOT 64

PAISLEY LAWN TENNIS CLUB

Signed and dated 1889, oil on canvas

63.5cm x 76cm (25in x 30in)

£400,000 - £600,000 + fees

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Paisley Lawn Tennis Club

During the early summer of 1889 Lavery returned to Paisley to make kit-kat sketches of dignitaries who had been invited to the reception held for The State Visit of Queen Victoria to the Glasgow International Exhibition in the previous year.[4] These tiny portraits would come together with 250 others in a large commemorative canvas depicting the event (Glasgow Museums). His year had begun in a flurry of travel arrangements and studio appointments. By the late Spring the project was well underway. Lavery had just returned from Darmstadt where he had painted the portrait of Princess Alix of Hesse (Private Collection), and other members of the royal retinue, when the short trip from Glasgow to Paisley took place. A visit, however brief, could not be made without calling upon friends in the town where he had staged his first solo exhibition in 1886. Principally these were members of the Fulton family who, on one particular day, had taken their daughter, Alice, to the local tennis club. [5]

While the girl is omitted from the present canvas, both small oil sketches produced in preparation for it include her, while focussing upon the figure group at the right of the composition. A note in the minutes of Paisley Art Institute in 1915 identifies the women taking afternoon tea as Mrs William MacKean and Mrs Archibald Coats of Woodside, while the lady in the background wearing a red shawl was Mrs Stewart Clark of Filnside.[6] The three tennis players, glimpsed through blossoming trees are Nina Fullerton, Hugh Macfarlane and the watercolourist, Alexander Balfour McKechnie.[7] The note concludes by describing the present work as ‘an excellent example of the artist’s earlier “Impressionist” style’, implying that, as with the preparatory sketches, it was completed on the spot. The spot, the original Paisley lawn tennis club in Garthland Place, is likely to have been sited on land partly occupied by the Abercorn Bowling Club, close to the railway line.[8]

Lawn tennis was, by 1889, approaching the height of its popularity. Invented by Major Clopton Wingfield in 1874, with the unappealing name, ‘Sphairistike’, it quickly replaced croquet as a middle-class pastime when boxed sets of essential equipment went on the market.[9] For the fashion-conscious factory-owners of Paisley, as the present canvas confirms, it provided the ideal theatre for social rivalries. For the artist however, in the midst of a year when time was measured in end-on appointments, dropping into the Paisley Lawn Tennis Club was a moment of delight. One had only to open a little pochade box or erect a lightweight tripod easel for the picture to come to him, unbidden. Lavery would later describe such moments as ones that brought him to ‘concert pitch’. These were times when in an elysian garden of women, the scene composed itself if you were quick enough to grasp its essence. In the present instance, there was no hesitation.

LOT 67

A ROUGH SEA

Signed, oil on canvas board

25.5cm x 35.5cm (10in x 14in)

£20,000 - £30,000 + fees

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A Rough Sea

By 1906, Lavery’s encounters with the sea were confined to a few odd moments on the Antrim coast, the Clyde estuary and the beach at Tangier. His recent purchase of Dar-el-Midfah, the house on Mount Washington, to the west of the Moroccan port, made short descents to nearby beaches a daily possibility during annual winter sojourns.[10] Here he constructed a garden studio and spent up to four months each year. The painter now became obsessed with the moods of the sea, making rapid sketches on 10 x 14-inch canvas-boards in all weathers. Like Turner, he was fascinated by the subtle colour transitions that led the eye from foreground foam to sea over sand, and on to the shrill cerulean and cobalt blues of the deep. Often, at low tide, his shoreline would be punctuated by rocky outcrops that would become sources of fascination for his stepdaughter, Alice, in later years. In the present instance, one of the earliest treatments of this enticing subject matter, we find a rock cluster that would feature in a number of larger canvases such as Tangier Bay, Rain, 1910 (Ulster Museum, Belfast. One only had to move a little to the left or right for a new abstract arrangement to suggest itself.

We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for writing these catalogue entries.

[1] Thereafter, what was originally ‘Burn Crook’, became known as ‘Lavery Cottage’. The Pond at the Glen, Paisley, represents the view of Glenfield House a few steps from Lavery’s cottage (both now demolished). During these years Lavery also maintained a studio in St Vincent Street, Glasgow, in what might be described as the artists’ quarter, in close proximity to Glasgow Art Club, of which he was a member.

[2] For The Parasol, see Ulster Museum and Fine Art Society, Sir John Lavery RA 1856-1941, 1984, no. 18.

[3] Lavery’s An Impression dans la sous bois [sic], 1884 was sold at Christie’s, 10 May 2007 (essay by Kenneth McConkey).

[4] McConkey 2010, pp. 43-48.

[5] Two sketches are known to have been painted on the spot. A companion sketch (Private Collection) shows Alice holding a racquet on her lap while the women on the left, one holding a scarlet parasol, have swapped places. The background, simply indicated with a broad brush, represents one of the courts.

[6] These women were of course, dynastic leaders of west of Scotland society. I am grateful to Andrea Kusel of Paisley Museum & Art Galleries for bringing this note to my attention in 2011.

[7] Both Macfarlane and McKechnie were prominent members of the Club, the former taking on the role of Honorary Treasurer by the 1891-92 season.

[8] Kusel, as above. I am also grateful to Michael Durning and Victoria Irvine, (emails 2015-18), for their valuable work on Lavery’s Fulton connections.

[9] Sumner, 1911, p. 13.

[10] McConkey 2010, pp. 96-105. With the exception of 1912-13, and the war years, Lavery returned every winter until 1919-20, to Tangier.

26 September 2024 From 18:00 BST

A Taste for Art : Selected Works from the Paisley Art Institute Collection

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