Sir John Lavery, R.A., R.H.A., R.S.A.

Dawson Gallery, Dublin;
Private collection

The board appears to be sound. There is some faint craquelure to an area of thick yellow impasto in the upper left corner; otherwise the work appears in good overall condition, ready to hang. Under ultraviolet light there may be a few minor spots of retouching in the lower left corner, near the bridge and near centre of right edge. Presented in a gilt plaster frame with a canvas inset.
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At some point in the late teens or early nineteen-twenties Lavery stood under the trees looking into a newly-created toy-town landscape. There were bonsai, tiny ornamental bridges, ‘Tori’ gateways, ponds and pagodas, with wasens (sampans) and miniature flamingos, complete with a concrete refashioning of Mount Fuji. Instantly the viewer was transported to a charming recreation of the iconic Japanese landscape. While he blocked-in the scene the painter was conscious of the backdrop of real trees, and the world beyond. In the moment, atmosphere enveloped artifice, and the impression brought authenticity to imitation.

Although Lavery is known to have painted a Japanese garden on the Riviera, the present study is likely to represent that at Westerdunes, the golfing retreat of the wealthy Edinburgh solicitor, Patrick Ford. Back in 1909 the painter had accepted a commission to produce portraits of Ford, his wife, Jessie, and his mother. At the time the solicitor had just taken occupancy of his new weekend retreat, a spacious Arts and Crafts house on the outskirts of North Berwick (McConkey in Michael Clarke, The Art of Golf, 2014, National Gallery of Scotland, pp.45-7). Here he had ambitious plans to install tennis courts and a formal garden to cater for influential guests from the worlds of politics, the law and the arts. The most important adjunct to the grounds of the house was however, a delightful miniature Japanese garden of the type that was currently fashionable before the Great War.

For the previous forty years, the taste for Japanese artefacts had grown rapidly in Britain as a result of the activities of merchants and designers such as Christopher Dresser, Charles Holme and Arthur Lasenby Liberty. There was even a ‘Japanese village’ established in Kensington and with the opening of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado in 1885, the interest in this exotic culture swiftly spread. It reached a more informed and sophisticated level with scholarly studies on Japanese art and by the time of the publication of Josiah Conder’s Landscape Gardening in Japan, (1893) and Alfred Parsons’s, Notes in Japan, (1895), the craze for Japanese gardens had taken off. It was compounded in 1910 with the garden installations at the Japan-British Exhibition in London.

Recently excavated by a previous owner of the house at North Berwick, Ford’s Japanese landscape was complete by the time of Lavery’s visits in 1916 and 1917 when he painted a view of the garden that includes an unidentified male guest (fig 1, see McConkey, John Lavery, A Painter and his World, 2010, pp.147-9). At the same time he produced a portrait of his wife, Hazel Lavery, using some of the garden’s motifs as a back drop. While it is likely that the present colourful sketch was executed on this occasion, it is not impossible that Lavery could have returned to this corner of the gardens when, between 1919 and 1922, when he went back to Westerdunes to paint his monumental series of canvases of the North Berwick golf links.

Although Lavery never visited Japan, in that moment he may well have recalled the vivid impressions of the country produced by his friend Alfred East and by fellow Glasgow Boys, George Henry and Edward Atkinson Hornel. Had he not led the way by painting Hokusai and the Butterfly (National Gallery of Scotland), in 1889 and before that, by including Oriental artefacts in the background of pictures such as Woman in a Japanese Dress, 1883 (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Conn.) and A Visitor 1885 (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin). Early photographs of his studio at that point, show a setting decked with paper fans and an impressive lacquer screen. It was an enthusiasm shared with his friend and patron, when Ford acquired Japanese Switzerland 1913 (sold Sotheby’s, London, 21 October 2015, lot 12). Lavery never forgot his debt to the printmakers of the Ukioy-e school. It was only natural that he would take an active interest in Ford’s endeavours. By the time of the Great War, this magic world of Old Japan had become a reality on the East Lothian coast and looking into it in the present rediscovered study, one enters the domain of dreams.  

Fig 1 John Lavery, The Japanese Garden, Westerdunes, 1916, 63.5 x 76, Private Collection