Lot 13
  • 13

Sir John Lavery, R.A., R.H.A., R.S.A. 1856-1941

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Description

  • Sir John Lavery, R.A., R.H.A., R.S.A.
  • A Summer Afternoon - Sketch
  • signed, inscribed with title and dated 1884
  • oil on panel
  • 29 by 34.5cm., 11 1/2 by 13 1/2 in.

Exhibited

London, Goupil Gallery, Pictures by John Lavery, 1891, no.9.

Catalogue Note

For the British art student community in Paris, the Salon of 1882 was an important event. It contained a series of paintings by Frank O’Meara and William Stott of Oldham which were painted in the village of Grez-sur-Loing, a few miles south of the town of Fontainebleau. Stott’s pictures were awarded a third class medal and this officially sanctioned approval for the path he had taken in joining an artists’ colony. We learn from Lavery’s first biographer that in his Paris circle debate ranged around the work of the British and American painters who dominated this colony. Grez, before Lavery went there the following year, was a recognized phenomenon – but in what way? Clearly it was the crucible of ‘plein air’ painting of the type derived from the work Jules Bastien-Lepage, Jean-Charles Cazin and Léon Lhermitte, although only one of these French Salon painters seems to have visited the village. This style of painting in the open air was applied by the Grez painters to scenes of peasant life, to produce a type of rural naturalism that concentrated upon the facts of appearances.

However, there were other inflections to Grez painting which distinguished it from that practiced in the other colonies of Normandy and Brittany. These were in part supplied by history and geography. Grez, when it was first discovered by a group of students from Carolus-Duran’s atelier in 1875, was regarded as ‘pretty’, ‘sleepy’ and ‘melancholy’ in turn. Pretty because it contained romantic ruins and an old bridge, sleepy because its stretch of the river Loing had been left as a backwater, by the construction of the Loing canal, and melancholy because its peaceful tranquillity suggested a village that was dying. New life was brought by successive waves of young artists, including groups of Scandinavian and Japanese, who arrived throughout the next twenty years.

There was however, one further ingredient which the sensitive Robert Louis Stevenson divined in the village air. Grez was within the ancient domains of Fontainebleau and the French court of the sixteenth century. Its palace and surrounding forests had become a retreat and recreation for succeeding generations of the French royal house. More recently, its forest paths had been re-laid by the Empress Eugènie to make them large enough to take the crinolines of her retinue in the 1860s. It was thus encompassed, according to Stevenson, by an aristocratic domain from which came forth, ‘the soft, secret, aromatic odour of the woods, not like a smell of the free heaven, but as though court ladies… still walked in the summer evenings, and shed from their brocades a breath of musk or bergamot upon the woodland paths’ (R.L. Stevenson, Essays of Travel, 1912, p.135). In recreation of the rituals court life, fancy dress parties, conducted to the great amusement of the locals, were regular fixtures among the artist community.

When he first arrived in Grez in 1883, Lavery wanted to represent the full range of village activity, as it affected both local peasants and expatriate painters. He produced the monumental Bridge at Grez (1883, private collection) and smaller, more informal, but equally studied paintings such as A Grey Summer’s Day, Grez (1883, private collection), representing artist incomers. At the same time works like The Laundress (1883, private collection), expanded thematically to On the Loing, An Afternoon Chat (1884, coll. Ulster Museum, Belfast), represent the daily doings of part of its local population. All are evidence of Lavery’s conversion to the principles of plein air painting. His palette lightened, and studio-based costume-pieces had disappeared.

However it was not long before those courtly aspects of the Grez ambience began to become obvious. He was on friendly terms with the phlegmatic Irish painter, Frank O’Meara whose Reverie (private collection) had been one of the great successes of the 1882 Salon, and he admired the dreamy, elegaic atmosphere of his work. In Lavery’s case, specific allusions to the art of the fête galante are confined almost exclusively to the present work. In the present A Summer Afternoon – Sketch, he gives his model a hat worn at a tilt, and covers her shoulders in a fichu, a voile wrapper of the sort which was commonly worn prior to the French Revolution. O’Meara had made similar allusions to the ancien regime in Autumnal Sorrows (1878, coll. Ulster Museum, Belfast). But where O’Meara is the poet of twilight, Lavery’s dreamy atmosphere is the byproduct of the sun’s heat at midday.

This example and The Return from Market (1884, sold in these rooms, 18th May 2001, lot 177) both contain the ‘shallop’, or flat-bottomed boat which appears in Une Baignade (Neue Pinakothek, Munich) and Le Passeur (private collection) the pictures which William Stott of Oldham had shown in 1882. But where peasants use it for prosaic purposes in Return from Market, here an elegant lady of the type we might find in sunny backwaters painted by Edward J Gregory or Arthur Hacker, rows towards the bank. In A Summer Afternoon – Sketch the subtlety of atmosphere, ‘the breath of bergamot’, is conveyed with great economy. Lavery blocks in the reflections of the trees on the far bank and conveys the surface of the river with a few ripples. Foreground reeds and grasses are stated in cursory strokes, à la japonaise. There is evident pleasure in the freedom and flexibility of the new methods learned in France – and complete understanding of their implications.

The lady is pulling close to the water’s edge and the riverbank on which we stand observing her is a trysting place.

Kenneth McConkey, 2004