John Lavery (1856-1941) - Suave Renditions

John Lavery
Miss Mary Burrell
1895
oil on canvas
Burrell Collection, Glasgow

John Lavery
Southampton Water
1918
oil on canvas
Imperial War Museum, London

John Lavery
Mrs Fitzroy Bell
1894
oil on canvas
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

John Lavery
Loch Katrine
1913
oil on canvas
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

John Lavery
Alice
1919
oil on board
Ulster Museum, Belfast

John Lavery
Tangier Bay, Sunshine
1920
oil on canvas
Ulster Museum, Belfast

John Lavery
Violet Keppel, Mrs Denys Robert Trefusis
1919
oil on board
National Trust, Sissinghurst Castle, Kent

"Born in Belfast, but soon orphaned, John Lavery spent his early years on his uncle's farm. At the age of ten, more family problems led to his relocation to Scotland, where he attended the Haldane Academy in Glasgow. Afterwards he worked as an apprentice photographer. From this experience he developed an ambition to become a portrait painter. Lavery travelled to Paris in 1881 where he studied drawing at the Académie Julian and painting at Colarossi's studio. During his stay at the artists' colony of Grez-sur-Loing in 1883 he discovered landscape painting, absorbing the plein-air methods of the Barbizon and Impressionist schools. In 1885 Lavery returned to Scotland and soon became a leading member of the Glasgow School of Painting. In 1888 he was given the commission of painting the state visit of Queen Victoria to the Glasgow International Exhibition. This task launched him as a society painter and he moved to London soon after, where he set up a portrait studio in Cromwell Place. London remained Lavery's base until the 1930s, when he settled once again in Ireland for the final years of his long life."  

– adapted from the Encyclopedia of Visual Artists in Ireland

John Lavery
Twilight, Lake of Geneva
1924
oil on board
Ulster Museum, Belfast

John Lavery
Anne Moira and the Honourable Mrs Forbes Sempill
1923
oil on canvas
Ulster Museum, Belfast

John Lavery
Tennis, Trent Park
1919
oil on canvas
William Morris Gallery, London

John Lavery
Phyllis Dare
ca. 1910-15
oil on panel
Ulster Museum, Belfast

John Lavery
A Convoy, North Sea, from NS-7, painted from an Airship off the Coast of Norway
1918
oil on canvas
Imperial War Museum, London

John Lavery
The Greyhound
(Sir Reginald Lister and Eileen Lavery, Drawing Room, British Legation, Tangier)
1910
oil on canvas
Ulster Museum, Belfast

John Lavery
The van Dyck Room, Wilton
1920
oil on canvas
Royal Academy of Arts, London

John Lavery
A Court at Buckingham Palace, 1931
1931
oil on canvas
(preparatory sketch for a lost painting)
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Keith Vaughan (1912-1977) - Landscapes (Nineteen Fifties)

Keith Vaughan
Gardens at Night
1951
oil on panel
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

Keith Vaughan
Landscape with a Green Church
1951
oil on panel
Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Keith Vaughan
Coast above Berwick I
1952
oil on panel
Manchester Art Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Demolished Houses in St John's Wood, No. 2
1953
gouache on paper
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Landscape
1953
oil on panel
Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester

Keith Vaughan
Berkshire Landscape
ca. 1953
oil on canvas
Kirklees Museums and Galleries, Huddersfield (Yorkshire)

Keith Vaughan
Landscape in Belsize Park, London
1954
oil on canvas
Museums Sheffield (Yorkshire)

Keith Vaughan
Village in Ireland
1954
oil on panel
Government Art Collection, London

Keith Vaughan
Black Rocks and Beach Huts, Whitby Bay
1955
oil on panel
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

Keith Vaughan
Untitled
1955
oil on canvas
Norfolk Museums (England)

In a landscape of having to repeat.
Noticing that she does, that he does and so on.
The underlying cause is as absent as rain.
Yet one remembers rain even in its absence and an attendant quiet.
If illusion descends or the very word you've been looking for.
He remembers looking at the photograph,
green and grey squares, undefined.
How perfectly ordinary someone says looking at the same thing, or
I'd like to get to the bottom of that one.
When it is raining it is raining for all time and then it isn't
and when she looked at him, as he remembers it, the landscape moved closer
than ever and she did and now he can hardly remember what it was like.

– Martha Ronk (2004)

Keith Vaughan
Vertical Tree Forms
1956
oil on canvas
New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester

Keith Vaughan
Farm in Berkshire
1956
oil on panel
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Keith Vaughan
Farm in Berkshire
1957
oil on canvas
Girton College, University of Cambridge

Keith Vaughan
Road through a Village
1957
oil on panel
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Keith Vaughan (1912-1977) - Drawings from the War Years

Keith Vaughan
Three Figures in a Group at Night
ca. 1939-45
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Group of Figures and Shading Studies
ca. 1939-45
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Four Studies of Figures and Study of a Beach
ca. 1939-45
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Two Men washing
ca. 1939-45
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
A Barrack Room
1942
drawing
Imperial War Museum, London

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes?
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride?

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy,
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

– William Butler Yeats (1939)

Keith Vaughan
Figure draping a Cloth over a Frame
ca. 1941-42
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Cook
1941
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Group with Ball on Beach
ca. 1941-44
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Two Men felling a Tree
1941
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Two Men working with Axes
1941
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Four Studies of Figures
ca. 1943-46
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Phallic Shapes
ca. 1943-46
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Eight Studies of Figures
ca. 1943-46
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Communication of Hate
ca. 1943-46
ink, graphite, pastel and watercolor on paper
Tate Gallery

British (and Irish) Painting - Eighteen Nineties (Tate)

Philip Wilson Steer
Mrs Cyprian Williams and her Two Little Girls
1891
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"Mrs. Williams was an artist who exhibited with Steer at the New English Art Club, and her husband T. Cyprian Williams was a collector of art.  D.S. MacColl recalled that the portrait was commissioned by another artist friend of Steer's, Francis James.  James owned the picture throughout his life, and it may be that it was painted at Steer's request, but that he needed the commission in order to be able to devote the time to it.  The design of the portrait is unconventional in that the point of view looks downwards from one corner.  Mrs. Williams is seen in profile, and her two daughters, placed on a bench that divides the picture diagonally, are seen from above.  It is likely that Steer felt freer to be so unusual since the portrait was not commissioned by the sitter."

Philip Wilson Steer
Model Seated before a Mirror
ca. 1894
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"In Britain, Steer pioneered the new French concept of painting naturalistic bedroom scenes of women dressing or washing.  It was an approach derived from the paintings of Edgar Degas.  This scene places the viewer in the role of voyeur, and the girl's absorption in her reflection echoes our own consideration of her.  Intimate scenes such as this were bitterly denounced by critics for indecency."

Philip Wilson Steer
Sleep
ca. 1898
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

Walter Sickert
Minnie Cunningham at the Old Bedford
1892
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"In the 1880s popular music halls sprang up in London and Paris, and Impressionist artists such  as Edgar Degas and Walter Sickert began to paint the audiences and acts.  Minnie Cunningham was a successful performer whom Sickert admired.  He first exhibited this picture with the subtitle 'I'm an old hand at love, though I'm young in years' – a quotation from one of her songs. "

Roderic O'Conor
Still Life with Bottles
1892
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"O'Conor grew up in Dublin, where he went to the Metropolitan School of Art.  By 1888 he had moved to Paris, and was associated with the American painters studying there.  Like them he visited Grez-sur-Loing to paint, and later went to Brittany for several summers.  This still life is indebted to the intense colouring of Monet's later landscapes.  Each area of the subject is painted as a pairing of separate colours."

Roderic O'Conor
Red Roofs
ca. 1894
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

George Clausen
Brown Eyes
1891
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"Clausen studied in France and painted open-air 'rural naturalist' subjects in an impressionist style.  In 1886 he helped to found the New English Art Club as an alternative exhibition venue to the Royal Academy.  This is a  portrait of a local girl from the village of Cookham in Berkshire, where the artist was living.  The delicate play of light across the model's features, together with the flicked brushwork in the background, suggest both the freshness and transience of youth."

Henry Scott Tuke
Mrs Florence Humphris
1892
oil on panel
Tate Gallery

Henry Tonks
A Girl with a Parrot
ca. 1893
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"The artist makes us feel like an intruder in this painting as we witness the private world of a young girl.  Dressed in a nightgown and gently brushing her long hair, she sits before a full length mirror studying her reflection.  A parrot watches the mechanical repetition of her brush strokes.  The small size of the painting draws our attention to the intimacy of the scene.  Tonks has captured a moment in the girl's childhood which adult viewers may regard with sadness or even envy." 

William Rothenstein
Woman standing in a Doorway
ca. 1894
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

William Rothenstein
The Butcher's Shop under the Trees
1899
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

Lucien Pissarro
April, Epping
1894
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"The earliest of Lucien Pissarro's paintings in the Tate collection, made a few years after he settled in Britain, April, Epping of 1894 reflects the artist's continuing admiration for Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, the 'neo-impressionist' or 'divisionist' artists with whom he had been friends in Paris.  For a few years his father Camille had also been an enthusiastic practitioner of divisionism, the style of painting in dots of light colour favoured by Seurat and Signac, and all four artists had shown a group of paintings in Paris in 1886, in the last of the series of impressionist exhibitions.  Lucien was then still living with his father, and had introduced him to these younger painters.  Camille did not persist with this laborious way of applying oil paint, but during the 1890s his pictures were still speckled with luminous touches of color.  Similarly, in his first paintings in Britain, Lucien did not continue to apply separate dots, as he had done in landscapes he painted in France until 1890." 

John Lavery
Mrs Guthrie
1898
oil on panel
Tate Gallery

"This tiny portrait study is of the wife of Lavery's friend the artist James Guthrie.  They had married the year before.  It may be a sketch for a larger portrait, or perhaps executed as a present.  Lavery became a stylish portrait painter, especially of women, and like Whistler had a preference for dark colours and elongated proportions, but with a sharper sense of fashion."

George Thomson
St Paul's
ca. 1897
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

"This is one of a series of pictures that Thomson made of St Paul's Cathedral from different vantage points and under varying light conditions.  According to D.S. MacColl, Philip Steer rescued this picture from Thomson's studio floor, presumably before it was first shown at the New English Art Club spring exhibition of 1898, where it was praised by the critics.  In 1889 Thomson had figured in the one and only exhibition of the London Impressionists, a group that included Sickert, who believed that the urban scenery of the capital was a valid subject for impressionist painting.  Thomson suspended his interest in impressionism in the mid-1890s in favour of Spanish Old Master style painting, but later turned again to Monet."

– quoted passages based on notes by curators at the Tate in London