Fine Art

Lavery’s Berwick Law

11 May 2026

Professor Kenneth McConkey

During the 1920s, summers for Sir John and Lady Lavery were punctuated by two retreats from the London season – Ireland in August, followed by Scotland in September. The first took them initially to Ulster to visit family and friends, before attending the horse show in Dublin, while the latter involved a stay of two or three weeks at Westerdunes, the coastal ‘getaway’ of Sir Patrick Ford at North Berwick.

Here the house party might include luminaries from the worlds of politics and the arts for whom recreations were provided by the adjacent golf course.¹

Lavery admired the East Lothian coastline, and during these sojourns, he painted views of the famous fairways, the gardens at Westerdunes and Ardilea, the open-air swimming pool and scenes in nearby Gullane, Tyninghame, Lennoxlove and, during the war, East Fortune. In one specific view of the links from the west, he took in the huge mound of Berwick Law – a conical ‘volcanic plug’ rising to 613 feet (187m), that dominates the surrounding lowlands.² In coastal views looking east from the Links, there was no escaping ‘The Law.’ So distinctive was the feature that it provoked curiosity – enough to justify the close encounter we see in the present landscape (fig. 2).

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Lavery’s landscapes almost exclusively direct the eye down from the heights to the human figure placed into a foreground that is often beyond hailing distance – as for instance in the majestic Lakes of Killarney 1913 (Private Collection) and Loch Katrine 1913 (National Gallery of Scotland).³ A hint of human presence gives scale and presence to the immensity. The same classic visual punctuation was appropriate in the present instance, in which he picks out two women at a gate in the hedgerow. They and the little buildings underline the ‘crag and tail’ of ‘The Law.’ A distant view of the sea between Tantallon and Auldhame can clearly be seen on the right in the background.⁴ Curiosity was satisfied.

Over thirty years separate Berwick Law from Lavery’s first Scottish landscapes. The present instance amply demonstrates the fact that none of the artist’s sensitivity to local colour has been lost in the interim. Greens, ochres and blues are managed with such perspicuity that we feel the solidity of the mound before us, while its unmistakable contour is recorded with equal acumen. And as shadows lengthen across the field, a gable wall glows in the sunshine and the road that leads us to it is a mere streak of Indian red.

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

^{See Michael Clarke, The Art of Golf, 2014 (exhibition catalogue, National Galleries of Scotland).}
^{See www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk}
^{For The Lakes of Killarney, 1913, see Kenneth McConkey, John Lavery, A Painter and his World, 2010 (Atelier Books, Edinburgh), p. 124 (illus); for Loch Katrine, 1913, see Lavery on Location, 2023 (exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Ireland), p. 145.}
^{For many years the present canvas was thought to represent Clonmel in Ireland, with a paddock in the foreground. However, given the distinctive topography of this part of East Lothian, and the failure to match the present hill to any in southern Ireland, this has been discounted.}

Artists

John Lavery

British 1856 - 1941

Department