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Lot Essay
Important changes began to occur in Lavery's portrait practice during the Great War. He began experimenting with toned grounds, painted 'single sitting' portraits and often left portions of the canvas deliberately unfinished. These features encouraged greater informality and ushered in the new era of the 1920s, in which grand manner Whistlerian full-lengths were replaced by half-lengths that take their modernity more from the generation of Raeburn and Lawrence than the great Edwardians.
Despite the fact that Lavery was deliberately purging earlier stylistic traits, the suave handling of Mrs Bowen-Davies' black dress and elegant fingers entwined with pearls, complement the obvious self-confidence with which she addresses the viewer. Black, as Lavery knew from long experience, dramatizes the flesh tones - which in the present instance are more evenly lit than would have been customary a few years earlier. In this, he was measuring up to younger portrait painters like William Orpen and Ambrose McEvoy, whilst remaining true to his origins in the seventeenth century Spanish tradition. As the recent portraits of the Countess of Powis and Lady Manton (both 1922), make clear, black, off-set by pearls, remained very much in vogue.
The sitter's identity remains unconfirmed. Suggestions that she was the wife of the American painter, Arthur Bowen Davies (1862-1929) seem unlikely since Davies married in 1892, and the woman here is unlikely to be in her late fifties. Mrs Bowen-Davies' portrait was accompanied at the Academy in 1924 by the equally elegant Marquis of Londonderry in the Robes of Chancellor of Queen's University, Belfast (Queen's University, Belfast), also a half-length.
We are very grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for providing the above catalogue entry.
Despite the fact that Lavery was deliberately purging earlier stylistic traits, the suave handling of Mrs Bowen-Davies' black dress and elegant fingers entwined with pearls, complement the obvious self-confidence with which she addresses the viewer. Black, as Lavery knew from long experience, dramatizes the flesh tones - which in the present instance are more evenly lit than would have been customary a few years earlier. In this, he was measuring up to younger portrait painters like William Orpen and Ambrose McEvoy, whilst remaining true to his origins in the seventeenth century Spanish tradition. As the recent portraits of the Countess of Powis and Lady Manton (both 1922), make clear, black, off-set by pearls, remained very much in vogue.
The sitter's identity remains unconfirmed. Suggestions that she was the wife of the American painter, Arthur Bowen Davies (1862-1929) seem unlikely since Davies married in 1892, and the woman here is unlikely to be in her late fifties. Mrs Bowen-Davies' portrait was accompanied at the Academy in 1924 by the equally elegant Marquis of Londonderry in the Robes of Chancellor of Queen's University, Belfast (Queen's University, Belfast), also a half-length.
We are very grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for providing the above catalogue entry.