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Review: The Irish genius who became a Glasgow Boy
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If you are in Edinburgh during the Festival be sure to visit the National Gallery’s new Lavery on Location exhibition – a well-curated tour de force of the works of Sir John Lavery, the Irish Impressionist who carved out a distinguished career for himself and became one of Britain’s best-loved painters.
The exhibition, sponsored by Irish law firm Arthur Cox, reaches Edinburgh after successful runs in both Dublin and Belfast.
Belfast-born Lavery, who was orphaned at the age of three, was brought up by relatives in Glasgow and learned to draw while working as an assistant in Glasgow photography studio. He subsequently became a prominent member of the ‘Glasgow Boys’ group of artists and shared their enthusiasm for and interest in the growing impressionist movement in France.
He joined the artistic exodus to the French countryside producing delightful sun-dappled works, some of which are included in the exhibition that traces Lavery’s travels with paintings in Scotland, Ireland, England, North Africa and France.
Success came early, when he won a gold medal at the Paris Salon in his early thirties and then became a much-sought after portrait painter of the wealthy.
Princes Street Edinburgh 1921, Sir John Lavery. Credit: Neil Hanna.
He cultivated a vast network of friends from the imperialist Winston Churchill to the Scottish socialist and nationalist R.B. Cunninghame Graham. His home in London was used to negotiate the Irish-Anglo Treaty and during the febrile period after the Irish Civil War Lavery, himself a home ruler, was honoured in both Dublin and Belfast.
The exhibition celebrates Lavery’s diversity and dexterity as a painter. As well as capturing idyllic summer days, he produced bleached out seascapes and, in 1917, was made a war artist after being rejected as a volunteer in his fifties.
His brilliant painting of a wounded young sandy-haired Gordon Highlander being treated in a London hospital was one of the first artistic works to focus on the human consequences of the conflict. During the same period, he also produced a striking painting of his American wife Hazel, a noted society beauty, watching an aerial dogfight from the window of their London home.
A short film contextualising Lavery’s prodigious and varied output records that in his eighties he crossed the Atlantic to paint in Hollywood. Lavery on Location is a superb homage to a remarkable man and great artist.
Royal Scottish Academy
From Sat 20 Jul 2024 - Sun 27 Oct 2024
Open daily, 10am–5pm
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