Sir John Lavery

One of 'the Glasgow Boys', John Lavery was born in Belfast in 1856. His father was an unsuccessful publican. After the family moved to Glasgow, he was apprenticed to a photographer. His experience here was to prove useful in his busy portrait practice later. He had his first art classes at the Haldane Academy in Glasgow and from there he went to London although he failed to gain entry to the Royal Academy. In 1881 he attended the Académie Julian in Paris where he was taught by Bourguereau although there is little evidence of this in his art. A visit to Grez in 1884 led to his acquaintance with Frank O'Meara and other member's of the artists' colony there. Under their influence, Lavery abandoned his studies of nudes à la Bourguereau and looked to artists like Bastien-Lepage instead. Although influenced by Lepage, Lavery was more interested in scenes of leisure and luxury 'en plein air' than in the working lives of the French peasants. In this he was more in tune with the Impressionists but Lavery's palette is darker in tone than theirs and eschews their brilliance. He was also more interested in formal composition than the Impressionists although he did submit himself to the more decorative approach of Whistler after his returned to London in the 1890s.

Lavery always wanted to be a portrait painter although his earliest successes were with landscapes, picking up prizes at the Paris Salon for such pictures as 'The Tennis Party'. When Queen Victoria sat for him, however, his success as a fashionable portraitist was assured. He bought a house in Tangiers in the early years of the 20th century and wintered there, returning to paint society and political portraits in England and Ireland and continuing to visit France and the Continent. His marriage to Hazel Trudeau in 1910 confirmed his place at the centre of Edwardian society. In 1917 he was appointed Official War Artist to the Royal Navy and was knighted the following year. He visited Ireland frequently during the 1920s recording important moments in the history of the new state and the faces of some of those most prominent in its evolution and subsequent administration. He came to live in Ireland after his wife's death and died in Co. Kilkenny in 1941.