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

Jonathan Clark Ltd, London;
Richard Green London, 1988;
Private Collection

London, Leicester Galleries, Portrait Interiors by Sir John Lavery RA,  1925, no 19 as Mary Borden (Mrs Spears) at Bisham Abbey;
New York, Duveen Galleries, Portraits, Interiors and Landscapes by Sir John Lavery RA, RSA, RHA, LL.D, 1925, no 30 (as Bisham Abbey, "Mary Borden" and her Family);
Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, Portraits, Interiors and Landscapes by Sir John Lavery, 1926, no. 3 (as Bisham Abbey, "Mary Borden" and her Family);
Dundee, Victoria Art Galleries, Paintings by Sir John Lavery, Kt, RA, RSA, 1936, no 22, as Mary Borden, the Novelist and her Family

John Lavery, The Life of a Painter, 1940 (Cassell and Co), illus. as Mary Borden and her Family at Bisham Abbey;
Kenneth McConkey, Sir John Lavery, 1993 (Canongate), p. 173

The canvas, protected by a perspex sheet to the reverse, is in good original condition, clean and ready to hang. Ultraviolet light reveals no sign of retouching. Held in a lightly decorated gold painted wooden frame in fair condition.
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In 1926, when Lavery staged an important series of exhibitions in North America under the patronage of Joseph Duveen, the spiteful Joseph Pennell grudgingly conceded that 'his idea of doing the millionaires surrounded by their millions was not bad'. (quoted in McConkey 1993, p. 169). Possessions were called into play to support personality and provide a glimpse of the living environment of the rich and famous. Thus in Mary Borden and her family at Bisham Abbey, we see a stylish lady novelist reading at an elegant writing desk in a sumptuous panelled interior with leaded windows and heraldic emblems. Back in 1909, with a picture entitled The Greyhound, (Ulster Museum, Belfast), Lavery initiated a new genre – that of the 'portrait interior'. For several years the followers of William Orpen had filled the New English Art Club with interiors which often contained recognizable individuals. But it was only with this picture of Eileen Lavery visiting Sir Reginald Lister, his greyhound at his feet, in the grey drawing room at the British Legation in Tangier, that the full potential of the portrait interior began to be explored. Even then, it only truly gathered momentum after the Great War when the Edwardian grand manner seemed unsuited to the new clientele of the Twenties house party.

Lavery's post-war series was inaugurated in 1917 with a splendid view of Falconwood, the home of Baron d'Erlanger at Shooter's Hill. Then, in 1920, he stayed at Wilton House to paint The Double Cube Room, the work which became his Royal Academy Diploma picture. Over the next five years, celebrities such as J.M. Barrie, Mary Borden, George Bernard Shaw, Count John McCormack, Lady Juliet Trevor and the Asquiths were all represented in favourite rooms. George Moore and his soulmate, Lady Cunard, sunk in the deep sofa of A Salon, typifies a group of canvases which finds its nearest parallel in the twenties portrait interiors of Edouard Vuillard. When shown at the Leicester Galleries the series was thought by Desmond MacCarthy to surpass the album of Grands Ecrivains photographed in the nineties by Paul Marsan Dornac. These paintings were, 'records of our times and significant commentaries upon that reckless changing thing called "good taste"' ('Sir John Lavery's Portrait Interiors', Apollo, Vol 2, 1925, p. 267). 

Mary Borden (1886-1968), like Hazel Lavery, came from a well-to-do Chicago family. She attended Vassar College before her marriage to George Douglas Turner, with whom she had three daughters. Travelling in Europe at the outbreak of the Great War she resolved to establish a field hospital for the French Army, and served as a nurse. Heroically she continued fund-raising for the hospital, writing to the New York Times for charitable donations while receiving the wounded from Ypres and the Somme. For her selfless courage she was awarded the Croix de Guerre. In October 1916 she met Edward Louis Spears, a staff officer attached to the French Ministry of War. Spears had grown up in France, but began his Army career with the Kildare militia – the 3^rd Dublin Fusiliers. Following a brief affair Borden divorced Turner and married Spears in April 1918. After the birth of their only child, while Spears sat as Member of Parliament, first for Loughborough and then for Carlisle, Borden developed her career as a novelist and two of her books were adapted into screen-plays for the cinema. An ally of Churchill, Spears again returned to France at the outbreak of the Second World War, and again Borden established a field-hospital – albeit short-lived. Both saw service in the Middle East, before Spears joined de Gaulle's staff. After the war Mary Borden resumed her writing career, publishing several novels in the 1950s.

Bisham Abbey, on the Thames, opposite Marlow, was constructed around 1260 for the Knights Templar. It was seized by Edward II in 1310 and sold to the 1^st Earl of Salisbury in 1337 who consecrated the main building as a priory. In Tudor times, Bisham was appropriated by the crown once again, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Henry VIII ceded it to Anne of Cleves as part of his divorce settlement and it was later sold to the Hoby family, in whose hands it remained until the eighteenth century. By this stage it had acquired a reputation as a haunted house. Borden and Spears were among its last private owners and it is now one of the National Sports Centres. Sadly, the drawing room in which Borden sits has been remodelled and the panelling removed.

So successful was his tour of America in 1926, that Lavery was commissioned to paint portraits and ornate interiors for the Pierpoint Morgans. On a second visit the following year the sumptuous saloon of the celebrated Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach was one of his subjects. However, the feature that places the Bisham Abbey interior firmly into the grands ecrivains series, is undoubtedly the author, centrally placed and calmly smoking as her children chatter in the background. Beyond them, reflected in a huge arch-shaped mirror is the painter at work on his canvas and the sitter's back view. Lavery, as a devotee of Velazquez, frequently resorted to such stratagems. Of these conceits the writer was oblivious. For the present, Borden's war experiences lay dormant. In a few years she would lift her recollections of the military field hospital to the level of high passion when she published The Forbidden Zone, A Nurse's Impressions of the First World War. Her recollections of the zone interdite, or 'No Man's Land' were so powerful that they shocked reviewers, coming in the same year as the war accounts of Ernest Hemingway, Robert Graves and Richard Aldington. While in 1929 she stood in this company, today her vivid incantatory prose is sadly neglected.

Kenneth McConkey