Life
1856-1941; painter, b. Belfast; son of impoverished Catholic publican
who drowned when he was three; raised by relatives nr. Moira, Co. Down;
ed. Magheralin Church of Ireland National School; moved to relatives in
Glasgow, 1865; ed. Glasgow School of Art, and Academie Julian; influenced
by Whistler; his ‘Tennis Party’ bought for Munich from RA show,
1886; uninterrupted success as portraitist following Queen Victoria’s
State Visit to Glasgow Exhibition in 1888; also conversation pieces such
as the Casement trial; knighted 1918; RHA, and other academies; m. Hazel
Martyn (d. 1935, of cancer), 1910, his second wife and the model for the
Irish banknote designed by him and current from 1928 to 1977; issued autobiography,
The Life of a Painter (1940), incl. 69 photo-engravings of his
work. He also painted her on her death-bed. DNB BREF DIB DIH DUB
OCIL
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Works
Irish Portraits by Lavery include, Edward Carson and Michael Logue (Ulster
Mus. Coll.); John Redmond (Municipal Gall. Coll.); James Craig, Craigavon,
Joseph Devlin; and self-portrait; TP O’Connor (NGI); Roger Casement
[in the dock], Terence McSweeney, George Moore. et al.; Muncipal Gallery,
Dublin, holds ‘St Patrick’s Purgatory [q.d; reproduced in Shane
Leslie’s study of Lough Derg]; ‘It is Finished’, 1935 [inscript.
Lavery, ‘the unfinished harmony, 1934’]; ‘Arthur Griffith’
[q.d.]; ‘Kevin O’Higgins’ [q.d.]; Hazel Lavery at her Easel’;
‘The Court of Criminal Appeal’, 1916; ‘The Blessing of
the Colours’; [n.d.]. See Brian O’Doherty, The Irish Imagination
1959-1971 (1971), Rosc Exhib. Cat.
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Criticism
A. Stodart Walker, ‘The Art of John Lavery’, in The Studio,
No. 255 (15 June 1914), 14 ills.; ‘Sir John Lavery’, in George
O’Brien and Peter Roebuck, eds., Nine Ulster Lives (Ulster
Hist. Found. 1992) [q.pp.].
Kenneth McConkey, Sir John Lavery (Edinburgh: Canongate Press 1993), 256pp. ill.
Sinéad McCoole [Mic Cumhaill], Hazel: A Life of Lady Lavery, 1880-1935 (Dublin Lilliput 1996), 242pp.
Frank McNally, ‘Goodbye to the Pound’, in The Irish Times (2 Jan. 2002), pp.9-11.
The Slate, Iss. 21, Feb. 2003; p.14.
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Notes
Brian de Breffny, ed., Ireland: A Cultural Encyclopaedia (London:
Thames & Hudson 1982), calls him leader of Glasgow School, he enjoyed
considerabel success as a London portrait painter, knighted in 1918; Pres.
Royal Society of Portrait Painters, MRA, and RHA, as well as academies
in Rome, Antwerp, Milan, Brussels, and Stockholm. Sympathetic to Irish
Independence, he produced pictures of the ‘Trial of Casement’,
and the lying-in-state of Terence MacSwiney. Designed Irish banknotes,
portraying his American wife Hazel as the emblematic figure [1923; and
see col. plate in Illustrated History of Ireland (1989), p.304
facing]; returned to Ireland and d. near Kilmoganny, co. Kilkenny. He
published an autobiog., The Life of a Painter (1940); see Walter
Shaw-Sparrow, John Lavery and His Work (1911).
Henry Boylan, A Dictionary of Irish Biography [rev. edn.] (Gill & Macmillan 1988), son of poor Belfast publican who drowned when he was three; apprenticed by Scottish relatives to painter-photographer in Glasgow at 17; ‘Tennis Party’ at RA in 1886 was bought for Neue Pinakothek, Munich; hon. degrees QUB and TCD; paintings include Roger Casement trial; Terence MacSwiney lying in state, and conversation pieces of George Moore and Ramsay Macdonald. His wife on banknotes from 1928.
D. J. Doherty and J. E. Hickey, A Chronology of Irish History since 1500 (Gill & Macmillan 1989, includes an article on Hazel Lavery; b. Chicago; m. Sir John, her second husband, 1910; friends were Shaw, Birkenhead, Winston Churchill; formed close friendship with Michael Collins; Kevin O’Higgins suggested Lavery as Gov.-General so that her talents as hostess could be shown.
T. P. Flanagan, review of Kenneth McConkey, Sir John Lavery
(Edinburgh: Canongate Press 1993), 256pp. ill., in ‘Summer Books, Fortnight (July/Aug. 1994),pp.9-10, notes that Lavery came from
a middle-class Catholic family on shores of Lough Neagh; orphaned and
raised by an uncle on Co. Down farm, and attended Protestant school.
Sale Price: “The Spanish Coast from Tangiers” sold at Christie’s auction in August 2003 for £251,650 [E350,800]. (See Irish Times, 17Aug. 2003.)
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)