A sensual artist of delights
BOYD TONKIN
LAVERY ON LOCATION
Ulster Museum, Belfast, until June 9; then Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, July 20 to October 27
LAVERY ON LOCATION KENNETH MCCONKEY WITH BRENDAN ROONEY
224pp. National Gallery of Ireland. £35.
BROAD, LOOSE, FLOWING brushstrokes conjure up an azure Mediterranean cove and, on its shore, a steep crag scattered with tenacious shrubs and trees. At one corner a smocked, hatted figure paints on an easel: he hurries to capture the idyllic scene, just as the actual artist behind him has. Dating from 1921, this sparkling impression of “The Blue Bay” – La Mala, near Cap d’Ail on the French Riviera – feeds a postwar longing for sunlit escape and repose.
The amateur painter depicted at the easel, though, had plenty on his mind. Winston Churchill, then Britain’s colonial secretary, had recently returned from the Cairo Conference, where decisions taken on Middle Eastern borders and rulers still cast shadows over global events. Soon he would embark on the tortuous negotiations that led, in December 1921, to the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the partition of the island that endures to this day. Unofficial sessions of Treaty talks took place at the South Kensington home of this painting’s creator, Sir John Lavery. With his American-born second wife, Hazel Martyn, Lavery had taught their friend Churchill to paint. Hazel was also close to the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins. As hostess and gobetween she played a significant, still disputed, role in brokering the final deal. Her image, via Lavery’s portrait of her as the national symbol Kathleen Ni Houlihan, adorned Irish banknotes until the 1970s. That Riviera morning had a deep, tangled hinterland.
Agile, versatile, protean, “an artist of many publics” (as the Belfast Telegraph declared in 1914), Lavery painted pleasure, but often stood on equal terms with power. Over a long and consistently successful life (1856–1941), the once penniless Catholic orphan from Belfast maintained a slick, smart professional practice as a fashionable studio painter of tycoons, aristocrats, statesmen, celebrities, even royals. His political access led to a remarkable portrait record of key players in the Treaty negotiations, from Churchill and Collins to David Lloyd George and Eamon de Valera.
In flight from the grey asceticism of Catholic and Protestant culture in his native Ireland, Lavery also pursued sensual delight across eye-ravishing landscapes. They stretched from France to Morocco, Spain to Switzerland, and both coasts of the United States: Palm Beach (Florida) to Palm Springs (California). Lavery on Location (organized in collaboration with the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin and the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh), now at Belfast’s Ulster Museum, is a generous and richly enjoyable panorama of his art of place. Caroline
