Lot 119
SIR JOHN LAVERY R.A.,R.S.A.,R.H.A.,P.R.P.,H.R.O.I.,L.L.B. (IRISH 1856-1941)
COTTAGES, BARBIZON BY MOONLIGHT
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture | 643
Auction: Scottish Paintings & Sculpture
Description
Signed, oil on canvasboard
Dimensions
25.5cm x 35.5cm (10in x 14in)
Footnote
Note:
In 1904 Lavery staged an important solo exhibition of pictures that surveyed his recent travels.[1] Vivid on-the-spot oil sketches captured moments in Morocco, Spain, Switzerland, Italy and France when the artist unfolded his pochade box-easel. The range of these works was remarkable, and with the French pictures in particular, he was revisiting some of the scenes of his youth in sketches ranging from Marlotte to Concarneau, Dieppe and Pourville. Recent contact with the Paris art world related to significant purchases by the French government – the Père et Fille, 1900 and Printemps, 1904 (both Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Latterly, as Vice-President of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, he had been in negotiation with Auguste Rodin who, in 1903, following Whistler’s death, agreed to take on the presidency of the society. The two artists exchanged works at this time, with Lavery’s large version of L’Été, (Musée Rodin, Paris) going to the sculptor’s private collection.[2]
There were, however, older ties with the Paris hinterland. Lavery’s happiest time in France had been in 1883-4 when he worked at Grez-sur-Loing.[3] One of his friends in these early days was the painter-etcher, Arthur Heseltine, who had married and set up home at the neighbouring village of Marlotte.[4] From there, Barbizon was within easy reach, and on his stay with the Heseltines in 1900, he took the opportunity to see the home of the famous Barbizon School – the subject of the present work. At the time of Lavery’s visit, the village was sinking back into its primordial slumber. Twenty-five years earlier at the time of Corot’s and Millet’s deaths, it had been overcrowded with young painters who were keen to catch something of the older artists’ inspiration. The overflow, led by Frank O’Meara and Robert Louis Stevenson, established the celebrated artists’ colony at Grez, where Lavery made his reputation.
Although it seldom features in the work of Millet’s contemporaries, the significance of Barbizon as a centre was, nevertheless, profound. As Lavery discovered on his return to Glasgow at the end of 1884, Scots collectors were buying Barbizon School pictures and young Scots painters such James Irving and Edwin Sherwood Calvert had recently worked there, depicting its little kitchen gardens and orchards. It may have been with these in mind that Lavery made his brief foray to paint the present evening scene.
The Leicester Galleries exhibition in November 1904, containing 49 such works grouped around Printemps, confirmed the artist’s pre-eminence. ‘Brilliant’, ‘original’, ‘accomplished’ were words deployed by critics who reported on the show, while The Manchester Guardian concluded its review by finding in Lavery’s works ‘a happy union of mood and method’.[5] In essence one might justifiably describe the present work as a ‘mood-piece’ in which warm tones evoke the atmosphere of evening. This is no picturesque or historic ruin, no Alpine vastness nor North African Kasbah, but a cluster of unprepossessing peasant dwellings. In observing them, we sense the fragrant atmosphere that lifts itself from a kitchen garden in the evening light. At the present time, it is Lavery’s only known painting of the illustrious village on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, and therefore unique.
[1] Kenneth McConkey, John Lavery, A Painter and his World, 2010 (Atelier Books), pp. 95-6.
[2] Ibid, pp. 79-85.
[3] John Lavery, The Life of a Painter, 1940 (Cassell), p. 53.
[4] McConkey, 2010, p. 79.
[5] ‘Our London Correspondence’, The Manchester Guardian, 7 November 1904, p. 6; see also ‘The Leicester Galleries’, London Daily News, 1 December 1904, p.2; Manchester Courier, 5 November 1904, p. 6 and Western Daily Press, 7 November 1904, p. 6, et al.