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

Hirschl & Adler, New York (no. 6186/2)
Acquired from the above in January 1985

London, Goupil Gallery, John Lavery RSA, June-July 1908, no. 23

A. C. R. Carter, “Recent Work by Mr. Lavery,” The Art Journal, 1908, p. 234, illustrated
Walter Shaw-Sparrow, John Lavery and His Work, London, [1912]., p. 142, 189
Kenneth McConkey, Sir John Lavery, Edinburgh, 1993, p. 115, 116, illustrated fig.137

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This painting has been lined using wax as an adhesive. On the reverse of this lining, an inscription seems to have been transferred from the original canvas. If the wax lining were reverse, which should be done, the original inscription may be revealed on the back of the original canvas. This may be a painting that does not need lining at all. There do not appear to be any structural issues or any retouches, except for possibly around the extreme edges. There may also be a few tiny retouches in the shadowed side of the figure's cheek and neck, but these are more than likely cosmetic. The work is in lovely condition, but reversing the wax lining is recommended.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

In 1904 when Printemps (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), a picture of an elegant young woman carrying spring blossom, was acquired by the French government from the Paris Salon there was much speculation concerning the identity of John Lavery’s model. She epitomized the ‘virginal simplicity’ of the artist’s ‘English girls …’ and was, according to Arnold Bennett’s Journal, the talk of the ateliers. The painter was already an internationally acclaimed artist, renowned for female portraits that were the acme of le style anglais, the English obsession that was currently gripping the faubourg St Germain. While painters like Jacques-Emile Blanche imitated Gainsborough and Reynolds, Lavery and his new model were authentically ‘English’. In this year of entente cordiale when King Edward VII was hailed for his francophilia, there could be no more appropriate expression of cross-channel fraternity than the purchase of Lavery’s work in Paris. Only gradually did it become widely known that the painter was in fact, Irish, and his sitter was German. She was nevertheless, a starlet.

Bennett, whose informant was a young painter, ‘K’ [probably Joseph Milner Kite], later breathlessly told him that,… she was aged 19, and was the rage of Berlin, asked to lunch at the Embassies, received 5 proposals [of marriage] in three months; how Lavery looked after her, sent her to bed at 9.30 every night; how she refused to sit for anyone but Lavery, and would only sit for him 2 hours a day, and he had to hire a woman to play to her and talk to her the while. (Newman Flower, ed., The Journals of Arnold Bennett, 1896-1910, 1932, p. 167, 170).  

Her name was eventually revealed as Mary Auras, and Lavery had recently taken her off to Beg Meil on the Brittany coast to paint her on the beach in a bathing costume. If the gossip was rife, it failed to deter the painter. His interest lay in the beautiful German girl and in the possibilities that her dark crimped auburn hair and fine bone structure gave him. In any case, in his late forties, his entourage included a chaperone for Mary and at Beg Meil his romantic attentions were elsewhere. It was here in September 1903 that he first encountered Hazel Martyn, the young American who he was to marry in 1909.

Mary had been introduced to Lavery in Unter den Linden by the painter Auguste Neven du Mont a couple of years before he met Hazel. The first paintings of her began to appear in 1902 and throughout the following year the artist posed her for a series of canvases that played up different colour harmonies. The degree to which this was self-consciously contrived in Printemps can only be fully appraised by comparison with more orthodox portraits of Fraulein Auras. Mary in Green (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), Lady in a Green Coat and The Green Sofa have none of the obvious fancy of Printemps.

Camille Mauclair praised Mary in Green for the technical qualities of ‘beautiful drawing’ and ‘true values’ (L’Art et les Artistes, vol 2, 1905, p. 6) while Lady in a Green Coat captured Stodart Walker’s attention because it showed that Lavery was,... ever obsessed by the colour possibilities of his models. He sees the colour métier of his sitters at a glance and weaves them into a harmony of paint with unerring skill (A Stodart Walker, ‘The Art of John Lavery, RSA, ARA’, The Studio, vol. lxii, 1914, p. 9).

Mary’s hair and complexion, according to ACR Carter, suggested that a ‘cunning weft of blue and green and pale saffron’ suited her best and it was in The Green Sofa that this particular aesthetic harmony came most clearly to the fore. Her sparkling dress with its touches of mauve, is the same as that in Lady in a Green Coat, enabling us to propose an early date of 1903 for the present picture.

More than his full-length portraits, The Green Sofa reveals Lavery’s long and deep indebtedness to James McNeill Whistler. Although separated by a generation, he was one of those who saw in the American expatriate, a profound admiration for Spanish Caravaggesque painting that linked the French Realists of Manet’s generation to seventeenth century masters. Velazquez was avidly researched in Lavery’s youth and copied in the Prado in the early nineties. Whistler in turn would have encouraged this respect from the moment of their first meeting in 1886 and when the younger painter and his Glasgow School contemporaries proposed an International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers for London in 1898, it was the American they invited to become their President, with Lavery as Vice-President. Thereafter, Whistler visited Lavery, offered some studio tips and corresponded regularly with him. In this eventful year when he was painting The Green Sofa, Lavery performed the sad duty of acting as a pall-bearer at Whistler’s funeral.   

Colour harmony was of course, Whistler’s forte, but in this case, the master’s influence touches the entire mise-en-scène – in the placing of the sofa parallel to the picture plane, the framed print that divides the upper edge of the picture and the ‘Japanese’ insertion of a blossoming orchid on the extreme left. Mary’s slumber compliments the languor of Whistler’s Symphony in White no III (fig 1).

Yet there were other suggestions in the ensemble. Despite the fact that it was ‘frankly Whistlerian in concept’ Carter for instance felt that The Green Sofa had been conceived with ‘Dutch thoroughness’. Here was further evidence of Lavery’s visual scholarship. The rigorous crafting that characterised Dutch interiors was in evidence here and it emphasised the international character of Lavery’s work. Recalling an earlier elegant full-length, Chou Bleu, 1903 (Museo Nacionale de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires), that attracted attention at the Salon, Mauclair declared that it was, ‘... as confident as an Alexander, as erudite as a La Gandara, as serene as a Boldini, as stylish as a Zorn, as sensitively pulsating as a Whistler’ (L’Art et les Artistes, vol. 2, 1905, p. 8). John White Alexander and Whistler were American; Antonio La Gandara was French; Giovanni Boldini, Italian and Anders Zorn, Swedish. Each had initially made his name in Paris and their reputations extended beyond their countries of origin. The confidence, erudition, serenity and sensitivity of these luminaries could equally be applied to The Green Sofa.

We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.