John Lavery

Biography

In 1888 the International Exhibition opened in Glasgow, and Queen Victoria visited it. The painting of that visit was commissioned from John Lavery, who was thirty-two. The work made him a society portrait painter, and soon afterwards he moved to London.

He was born on 20 March 1856 in the north of Belfast. His father, Henry Lavery, drowned in 1859 when the packet ship Pomona sank off the coast of County Wexford, and his widow died soon after. The boy was raised by relatives and lived now in Ireland, now in Scotland, including at Moira, in County Down.

In the 1870s he studied at the Haldane Academy in Glasgow. In 1878 he opened his own studio, but it burned down the following year; with £300 of insurance money he spent a year at Heatherley's School in London. He spent the early 1880s in Paris, at the Académie Julian, and lived in the artists' colony at Grez-sur-Loing, where the influence of Bastien-Lepage is evident; in 1883 he first showed work at the Paris Salon. On his return he joined the group known as the Glasgow Boys. In Glasgow he had a patron, the shipowner William Burrell, and in 1896 he painted, on Burrell's commission, a portrait of Burrell's sister, Mary. The portrait was widely exhibited and is regarded as one of Lavery's finest works. From 1886 he exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy of Arts, and together with James Guthrie and Alexander Roche he showed at the Grosvenor Gallery in London and at the Glaspalast in Munich. In London he became friends with James McNeill Whistler and, it seems, took a great deal from him; in 1897–1898 they founded the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers together, and Lavery remained its vice-president until 1908.

In 1889 he married Kathleen MacDermott, but she died in 1891, leaving a daughter, Eileen. After that he spent long periods on the Mediterranean and in North Africa, working in Tangier in winter and drawing a great deal. In 1909 he married again, an Irish-American, Hazel Martyn. She sat for him in more than four hundred paintings.

From 1910 Lavery painted prominent figures: Winston Churchill, Herbert Henry Asquith, Lord Derby, and the Irish politicians John Redmond and Edward Carson. Churchill called him his teacher in painting. In the First World War Lavery was appointed an official war artist, as William Orpen was, but he never reached the Western Front: first his health prevented it, and then a serious car crash during a Zeppelin raid. He stayed in Britain and painted mostly boats, aeroplanes and airships, and later the fleet at Scapa Flow; he gave these pictures to the Imperial War Museum. In those years he was often a guest of the Asquith family at Sutton Courtenay on the Thames, painting their portraits and summer scenes such as “Summer on the River”.

After that events move fast. In 1911 he became an associate member of the Royal Academy, in 1918 or 1913 he was knighted (sources give different years), and in 1921 he was elected a full member of the Academy. His works were included in the art competitions at the Olympic Games of 1924, 1928 and 1932. In the late 1920s he chose the coral blue and silver colour scheme for the ballroom of the Empress of Britain, a liner built on the Clyde.

Lavery and his wife were somewhat involved in the Irish events of those years: during the negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty they lent their London home to the Irish delegates. After the assassination of Michael Collins, Lavery painted “Michael Collins, Love of Ireland” (Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin). In 1923 the authorities of the Irish Free State commissioned from him a design for new paper currency; the allegorical figure of Ireland on the banknotes, which were printed from 1928 to 1975, was painted from Hazel. The face on the money is, to my mind, his most widely circulated work.

In 1929 he gave many of his paintings to the Ulster Museum and the Hugh Lane Gallery, and in the 1930s he returned to Ireland. The University of Dublin and Queen's University Belfast awarded him honorary degrees, and he became a freeman of both cities. Among his late works, “The Chess Players” (1929) is well known; it is in the Tate Gallery.

Lavery died on 10 January 1941 at Rossenarra House in Kilmoganny, County Kilkenny, and was buried in Putney Vale Cemetery in London.