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

Sale, Christie's London, 9 May 1996, lot 75;
Milmo Penny Fine Art, Dublin;
Richard Green, London

Possibly London, Leicester Galleries, Cabinet Pictures by John Lavery, November 1904, no.28, as Concarneau, A Grey Day;
Pont-Aven, Musée de Pont-Aven, Peintres Irlandais en Bretagne, 26 June - 27 September 1999, with tour to Cork, no.20, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue.

Walter Shaw Sparrow, John Lavery and his work, n.d., [1912] London 1911, p.185;
Kenneth McConkey, Sir John Lavery, Edinburgh, 1993, p.90, pl.101;
Denise Ferran, William John Leech, An Irish Painter Abroad, exh. cat., National Gallery of Ireland 23 October 1996 - 15 December 1996, p. 33, illustrated.

 

The colours are fresher than the illustration suggests. Original canvas in good overall condition with some strong passages of impasto throughout, notably in the sky and to the figures. Under ultraviolet light, there are some small minor specks of retouching along the top edge and some other specks scattered along the other edges. There are some minor flecks of retouching in the centre of the sky and in the bottom left corner. Held in a plaster gilt frame.
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During the summers between 1903 and 1905, Lavery worked on the Breton and Normandy coasts. His movements are difficult to track and the dates added to some of his sketches are notoriously unreliable. We can be certain however that he visited Concarneau in 1903 to seek out the American expatriate painter, Alexander Harrison who was residing nearby at Beg Meil. A return visit in 1904, at the suggestion of Joseph Milner Kite is also proposed, although this may be confused with that of the previous year. It remains the case that Lavery's exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in November 1904 apparently contained only one related sketch – Concarneau, A Grey Day. If this and the present work are not one and the same, his record of the waterfront at Concarneau is almost unique in the oeuvre, leading us to conclude that his contact with the fishing port was slight.

Why did Lavery not succumb to the charm of the harbour and the 14^th century fortified Ville Close as other Irish painters such as William John Leech and Aloysius O'Kelly were to do? By 1903, holding honours from European and American academies, Lavery's reputation was already established. The town, with its substantial colony of American art students, may instantly have reminded him of his origins in Grez-sur-Loing and he had no desire to revert to painting peasants and fisherfolk. His clear objective in going to Brittany and Normandy was to paint figures on the shore and for this he brought his own models and studio assistant – on one occasion travelling with Mary Auras, on another, with Idonea La Primaudaye. At this point he hoped to complete a full-length portrait on the beach, an evocation of Summer, which he later presented to Auguste Rodin (see lot 150).

This does not mean that he was insensitive to the character of the busy harbour, the centre of the sardine fisheries. Although Breton women parade before him, Lavery retains his reporter's instinct and avoids the stylisations of the British and Irish followers of the Pont-Aven School, such as Robert Brough, Chetwood Aiken, Eric Forbes-Robertson and Roderic O'Conor, who played up the visual drama of the traditional costume. Lavery remains strictly factual and of the moment; he tells us that had we been there on this particular wet or grey day, this is what we would see. In a sense therefore, A Wet Day, Concarneau can be related to his early sketches of the Glasgow International Exhibition in 1888, where seemingly random groups of passers-by form and re-form in the crowded scene. The sense of space is dependant upon the scaling of the figures as much as by conventional perspectives, and the foreground is fringed by boats, their nets hung upon the masts hopefully to dry.

Kenneth McConkey