Having completed his commissions for the newly established Imperial War Museum, Lavery seemed destined to revert to the role of portrait painter.[1] Although he returned to Morocco at the end of 1919 it was to be his final visit.[2] The war had broken a spell and the old friends who had been regular visitors to his studio in Tangier before 1914, were scattered. At the same time the Riviera was calling a new generation of hivernants, and the pleasures of Cap d’Ail and St Tropez suddenly seemed more attractive. These explorations, old and new, supported by landscapes from North Berwick to north London, were to be the focus of an exhibition held at the Alpine Club in October 1921 which also included works by Lady Lavery.
Churchill had accompanied the Laverys for part of the time on a recent extended Mediterranean trip, when he joined the artist, working on the motif. He had been Lavery’s pupil, intermittently, since 1915, and anxious to show his appreciation for what he had learned, he agreed to supply the preface to the exhibition’s catalogue. Despite what many of his former sitters might think, Churchill declared:
Sir John Lavery is a plein-air artist if ever there was one, painting entirely out of doors, with his eye on the object, and never touching a landscape in the studio. No painter has ever coped so successfully with the difficulties of this method. His practical ability makes it child’s play to transport easel and extensive canvas to the chosen scene, to stabilize them against sudden gusts of wind, to protect them from the caprice of rain; and he is so quick that no coy transience of effect can save it from his clutches … In consequence there is a freshness and a natural glow about these pictures which give them an unusual charm. We are presented with the true integrity of an effect. And this flash is expressed in brilliant and beautiful colour with the ease of long mastery.
Churchill’s first-hand experience told him how well prepared the painter had been for all kinds of adversity. His stout easel and portable rack containing up to five 25 x 30 inch canvases would travel everywhere with him, even if the journey was little more than the distance from Kensington to Hampstead. In the summer of 1921, it seemed appropriate that a show devoted to scenes of recreation and leisure should be opened by a view of the Heath.
As Constable had discovered a hundred years before, there was nothing so majestic as the rolling hills stretching south towards the Thames and north into neighbouring Hertfordshire. These were what Lavery faced in the present work, ‘not worrying’ in the words of one critic, ‘about self-expression or other modern ideas’. Like his predecessor he could not help but be impressed by the dramatic skyscapes that were visible from this vantage point – imitating, perhaps unconsciously, the essential divisions of sky and land near what in Constable’s day were sandpits (see John Constable, Hampstead Heath 1820, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). Seventy years later this landscape was under threat from suburban encroachment, modern ‘improvements’ and the grime raining down from London’s riverside industries. It was, for all this, a resort for day-trippers and as such was celebrated in 1897 by David Murray in Hampstead’s Happy Heath (fig. 1).[3]
Planted now with flowering trees, Constable’s working landscape is turned into an anodyne pleasure garden cluttered with dogs, a donkey, children, a perambulator and a Chelsea pensioner, on a sunny day out. The heavens lose their force and nature succumbs to anecdote.
In the present work, Lavery restores the drama of Constable’s magisterial sketches. His walkers are no more than distant touches of pigment under a reddening sky. Conveying the ‘natural colour and brilliance of the scene’, Hampstead’s ‘grey heath’ in the first of these vivid Alpine Club impressions, is the foil to a ‘glorious blue and purple distance’, according to a contemporary critic (‘The Fresh Air Artist’, Birmingham Daily Gazette, 22 October 1921, p. 4). Churchill surely was right in finding ‘a freshness and a natural glow’ in such pictures. Although the following years took him back to the Riviera, and to Switzerland, Ireland and the United States, Lavery never forgot his visit to the Heath and ten years later when his teenage granddaughter, Diana, was riding regularly in Hampstead he returned to the scene represented in the present work (fig. 2).[4]
In 1930 there was something in this old familiar frieze of woods and hills that fired his memory - the ‘flash’, perhaps, that was ‘expressed in brilliant and beautiful colour with the ease of long mastery’. Coming in the wake of war as the first painting in the Alpine Club show, the present Hampstead vista signalled a newer world.
Professor Kenneth McConkey
[1] The verso inscription here would suggest that the artist reused one of his less successful or incomplete war canvases to produce the present work. Lavery had painted the British Fleet at Flotta and Weddell Sound and Scapa Flow during the winter of 1917. The deleted inscription, ‘1916’ in common with many of Lavery’s autograph post-datings, is erroneous.
[2] Kenneth McConkey, John Lavery, A Painter and his World, 2010, (Atelier Books), pp. 147-152.
[3] Murray was criticized for his rosy, sanitized view of the Heath; see ‘The Royal Academy’, The Athenaeum, 15 May 1897, p. 583.
[4] McConkey, 2010, pp. 186-7. Diana on Hampstead Heath (Private Collection) was shown at the Royal Academy in 1931 (no. 843). A view of the Heath, not including Diana was also executed at this time (Private Collection).