SIR JOHN LAVERY, R.A., R.S.A., R.H.A. | TEA AT PALM SPRINGS

The Leicester Galleries, London;

H. Pattinson-Knight Esq.;

Christie's, London, 21 May 1997, lot 74

Lavery had first visited Palm Springs two years prior to the present work. An avid traveller throughout his life, on that occasion he went to the Hollywood film studios before going to stay with his friend and painter from their days in Tangier, Gordon Coutts, and his wife, Gertrude, a trained opera singer, at their villa, Dar Maroc, in Palm Springs (McConkey 2010, pp. 200, 202-5).

Gordon died the following year but in 1938 Mrs Coutts pressed Lavery for a return visit. So, accompanied by his granddaughter, Ann Moira Forbes-Sempill, and his secretary, Katherine FitzGerald, the eighty-one-year-old painter returned to the Californian desert, arriving a week before Christmas. The trip was marred by tragedy however when all three, along with Gertrude, and a young painter friend, Jack Schurch, were involved in a car accident that claimed the life of Mrs Coutts (Desert Sun, vol IX, no 21, 24 December 1937, pp. 1,5). 

Lavery remained in Palm Springs in the immediate aftermath of the accident as members of Gertrude’s family rushed to support her two daughters, one of whom, Mary Gordon Coutts, (later Mrs Korst), now approaching her sixth birthday, had posed for him in 1936. 

Despite the trauma, Lavery attempted a number of sketches before leaving Palm Springs, and the present work, showing a gathering of friends under the pergola at Dar Maroc is one of these. Inevitably it recalls similar gatherings painted before the Great War, at Dar-el-Midfah, Lavery’s house in Tangier. In that moment, early in 1938, Lavery’s flair was undiminished. Notes of vivid colour are dotted in place and the wooden structure, grapevine and Moorish arches - the spatial and compositional scaffoldings - are swiftly established. Thereafter the seated figures and sleeping collie are beautifully realised while the deckchair on the left is that which appears in the earlier portrait of little Mary Gordon Coutts.

Kenneth McConkey (with thanks to Pamela Korst and the late Lady Ann Sempill)