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

Venice, IX Exposizione Internazionale d'Arte della Citta di Venezia, 1910, no.35 as Giornata ventosa.

Walter Shaw Sparrow, John Lavery and his Work, n.d., [1912], Kegan Paul, Trubner, Trench and Co, p. 193 as A Windy Day by the Sea.

Original canvas. There is some very minor surface dirt otherwise in excellent original condition with strong passages of impasto throughout. Under ultraviolet light, there appear to be no signs of retouching. Held in its orginal plaster gilt frame under glass; unexamined out of frame. The colours are slightly richer than the catalogue illustration suggests.
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The present canvas, A Windy Day, confirms Lavery's internationalism. Walter Shaw Sparrow, writing on his 'travel sketches' shown at the Venice Biennale in 1910, stated that,

'... their appeal was remarkable, and [those] from Morocco certainly helped us to understand why connoisseurs outside England have set so much store by Lavery seascapes and country scenes' (Walter Shaw Sparrow, John Lavery and his Work, n.d., [1912], Kegan Paul, Trubner, Trench and Co, p. 87).

Despite the fact that membership of the Royal Academy eluded him, the painter was being fêted in Venice as the featured artist in the British Pavilion and major works from the French, Belgian and Italian state collections were recalled for what amounted to a retrospective exhibition (Fifty-three works were listed in the Biennale catalogue of which A Windy Day was numbered 35.  The Biennale label on the reverse of the present work indicates that this work was definitely shown in the exhibition although it is numbered '67'.  This unexplained discrepancy may simply indicate that the hanging order in the British Pavillion was different from the numbering in the catalogue). As vice-president of the London-based International Society, Lavery had been keen to display the work of leading European artists, some of whom painted important coastal genre pictures portraying the leisured middle classes. He believed that a painter's work should be of its time, in style and subject matter and that it should not be narrowly nationalistic. He would have hailed the likes of Joaquín Sorolla, Max Liebermann and Peder Severin Krøyer as true contemporaries. Sorolla for instance, enjoyed huge international prestige and was celebrated in London in 1908 with an exhibition of 300 works. Had he seen this show, Lavery would have recognized a kindred spirit, observing Sorolla's clear juxtaposition of sunlit white dresses with the vivid blues found in beach scenes (fig. 1). Such scenes as A Windy Day in demonstrating Lavery's own fascination with figures set against the sky or sea, take us to the very heart of Impressionism. Claude Monet's Essai de figure en plein air (fig.2, 1886, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) shown in London in 1889, could well have been studied by Lavery – as it was by Sargent. Twenty years after Monet's women with parasols were painted, this motif remained current. Youth, beauty and health, flourishing at the seaside - the theme of Marcel Proust's jeunes filles en fleurs – remained an enduring modern theme and for the painter this was translated into bright colour, clear shapes and sunlight 'glare'.

The derivation of Lavery's figures en plein air dates back to the early 1880s when he worked in the garden of the Chevillon hotel at Grez-sur-Loing (see lot 124). Ten years later he was attempting to paint plein air portraits such as A Girl in White, 1894 (Art Gallery and Museum, Perth), but it was not until 1903 when he painted Summer, (fig 3, Musée Rodin, Paris) that the task was resumed in earnest. This large canvas showing Mary Auras (see also lot 148) carrying a large parasol on the beach at the Breton village of Beg Meil, was the product of a visit to an old friend – the American painter of beach scenes, Alexander Harrison. Enthralled by the shore light at dawn and dusk, the eremite 'Elstir' Harrison seems to have abandoned painting figures by this stage. Set alongside the Whistler and Monet beach scenes which Lavery had borrowed for the recent exhibitions of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, works from these summers on French coast assume a greater artistic significance in the gradual dissemination of Impressionism.

The earlier version of A Windy Day, (fig. 4, Private Collection), for instance, a large canvas showing Lavery's daughter Eileen and an unidentified companion, possibly Idonea La Primaudaye, posing on a headland path, was painted using sketches produced at Pourville. It became a centre-piece at the Venice Biennale in 1907. The success of these experiments coincided with Lavery's frequent winter visits to Tangier. From 1904 onwards he devoted himself to a long series of studies of Tangier bay with tiny figures dotted on the sands. However, such notes of colour merely acted as foils to the empty expanse of sea, and in 1908, he returned to the idea of the plein air portrait with Girls in Sunlight, (fig. 4, destroyed).  

This important work, showed Mary Auras and the seventeen-year-old Eileen Lavery, walking along the sands. Highly regarded at the time, it was used as a frontispiece for Walter Shaw Sparrow's monograph on the painter in 1912, and described as 'a most cheering sketch ... the sea glowing as a background, and a glare coming from everywhere' (Walter Shaw Sparrow, John Lavery and his Work,  n.d., 1912, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., p. 150). Such words could equally apply to the present canvas in which one of the two girls, most probably Mary, accompanied by a small dog, battles with the wind. These winter trips to Tangier were frequently bedeviled by the sirocco which swept the Straits of Gibraltar on sunny days in February and March, rippling white dresses – Arab or European – on the breeze. The effect was natural and symbolic. In classical times, the wind was a metaphor for the passing of time, the sweeping away of earthly vanities and the sound it made was a message from the gods. 

Kenneth McConkey