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

The Artist, thence by family descent

Kenneth McConkey, John Lavery, a Painter and his World, Atelier Books, 2010, p. 165

London, The Leicester Galleries, Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Sir John Lavery, RA, April 1941, no. 14

Glasgow, Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, 1941, no. 587

Following the cessation of hostilities in the Irish Civil War and Lavery’s subsequent appointment to the Board of Guardians of the National Gallery of Ireland in January 1924, the painter conceived the idea of staging an ‘Irish’ themed exhibition. To do this, he followed his summer visit to Aonach Tailteann, popularly known as the Irish ‘Olympic Games’, with a motor tour of the southern counties. His route took him to Glendalough, then to Tramore and Clontarf, with Kerry as his final destination. Along the way he painted landscapes, roadside stonebreakers, a blacksmith’s shop, a ‘penny-whistler’ and the present family group.

Abandoning the polite society of the Dublin ‘season’, his design, as always, was to show the contemporary scene without embellishment. Despite the new dawn of Irish independence, its people remained impoverished. The conventional tropes of ‘stage Irishry’, the jaunty simian clad in corduroy, were banished however, in favour of formidable realism and the brutal beauties of Wicklow and the south west.

In Kerry, Mrs O’Sullivan, her husband and two daughters, clearly invited him in and offered him tea, and while they sat, he painted. There was nothing fancy about what they could give – merely meagre rustic hospitality that would be available to any stranger. Lavery had seen characters like these emerge in the work of Sean Keating and Charles Lamb, but here they are stripped of heroism and offered to the viewer with neither literary, religious nor folkloric overtones, but as they live. As Mr O’Sullivan catches his eye, there is only the honest observation of a nation in this powerful representation of a typical Irish family. 

Professor Kenneth McConkey