Harold Harvey

Sale: Christie's, London, 14 December 2016, lot 84

Private collection

Probably London, Royal Academy, 1916, no. 889, as The Green Gown

Probably Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, Autumn Exhibition, 1916, no. 216, as The Green Gown

Kenneth McConkey, Peter Risdon and Pauline Sheppard, Harold Harvey, Painter of Cornwall, 2001, probably p. 146, cat. no. 221

The title Lady in an Interior Arranging Flowers is almost certainly a modern one and it is likely that this picture is The Green Gown first shown at the Royal Academy in 1916. The present picture is alike, both in size and subject to The Blue Gown (private collection) painted a year later and it is possible that they were painted as a pair. Both pictures depict the artist’s wife Gertrude, herself a talented artist – at their home Maen Cottage, Newlyn. After the outbreak of WWI when Harvey was restricted from painting his usual Cornish coastal subjects by strict rules about what could and could not be painted, he painted a series of elegant interiors of Gertrude. Like The Blue Gown here she is depicted full-length wearing the same floral shawl and rather than pulling on her gloves, she is arranging anemones in a vase. Her brilliantly-coloured green dress is contrasted with the yellow painted wall behind her. The Japanese print hanging on the wall adds to the fashionable glamour of the interior and also nods towards the influence of Whistler on Harvey’s work. The demi-lune table appears in several other pictures by Harvey - it features twenty years later in The Favourite Necklace (sold in these rooms, 25 November 2004, lot 418) and The Letter also dated 1937 (Christie's, London, 7 June 2002, lot 74).

Kenneth McConkey has pointed out that contemporary reviewers described The Green Gown as ‘charming’ and a work on which ‘he has lavished an unusual amount of skill … and has achieved a marvelous result’ (‘Newlyn Artists’ Work – Pictures for the Great Exhibitions’, West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser, 23 March 1916, p. 4; ‘The Newlyn Pictures Annual Show Day at the Opie Memorial Gallery’, Cornishman, 23 March 1916, p. 3).