Portrait of a girl with fur wrap, seated in profile

The present work represents an unidentified model who appears in Lavery's work in the mid-1880s. It is likely that she was first painted in Glasgow canvases such as Between the Sittings, 1882 (Christie's, 17 May 2001, lot 40) but this cannot be confirmed.1 She returned with the present work, A French Girl, 1887 and Girl with an Ostrich Feather in her Hat, 1887 (both private collections).2

Lavery's only identified model at his Bath Street studio during the years 1883-7 was an Irish girl named Bella Cullen who posed as Mary, Queen of Scots for Dawn after the Battle of Langside, 14 May 1568, (private collection). Such was her regal bearing that, despite being the daughter of a coal-miner, 'she might', according to Lavery, 'have been the queen'.3 However, there is no evidence to assume that the young woman in the present picture is Bella, even though she seems confident and self-aware. Dressed in contemporary costume as though attending a ball or the theatre, she might be compared with young Parisians depicted by Renoir, Degas and Mary Cassett, were it not that, being consciously posed, her ensemble more appropriately indicates Lavery's ambitions as a portrait-painter. Calm concentration on the delineation of the profile and sensitive rendering of flesh colours, contrast with the sketchy handling of the fur wrap covering the girls's shoulders and serves to remind us that such a format returned briefly to prominence in the 1880s with Bastien-Lepage's Sarah Bernhardt, 1879 (private collection).

Lavery, an admirer of Bastien-Lepage's work, may well have seen this painting when it was exhibited in 1880. Alternatively, a brief visit to Paris in 1885 would have been sufficient to inform him of an icon that enjoyed a huge contemporary reputation.4 Unlike a conventional full-face portrait, the silhouette enabled the sitter to be studied objectively without distracting interaction. Most of those who came to the studio to be painted, regarded sittings as an opportunity for social exchange and within the entirety of Lavery's oeuvre, profile portraits are comparatively rare. Girl with a fur wrap, holding her pose, and clearly aware that her face is being studied, provided a valuable learning experience for the painter. Touches of green, deployed to enliven the background, and accentuate the coral beads and auburn tints of the girl's hair, complete the composition - giving the sense that this young woman has been observed on some public occasion. Although he did not realise it at the time, viewing the figure from this angle Lavery was anticipating the many swift sketches he would have to paint in preparation for The State Visit of Queen Victoria to the International Exhibition, Glasgow, 1888, 1890 (Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum). This formidable test of his powers was yet to come.

1 The model from Between the Sittings also appears in canvases such as A Conquest, 1882 (Glasgow Art Galleries and Museums). She disappears during 1883 and 1884 when the painter was working at Grez-sur-Loing.
2 K. McConkey, Sir John Lavery, Edinburgh, 1993, p. 48. It is possible that this model also appears in the three versions of Ariadne, Lavery's experiment in classical painting.
3 Bastien-Lepage's Sarah Bernhardt, first shown at the Paris Salon in 1879, was re-exhibited the following year at the Grosvenor Gallery in London. It re-appeared at the artist's posthumous retrospective at the Hôtel de Chimay in Paris in 1885. Because of the immense popularity of the sitter, it was also reproduced.

K.M.