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Lot Essay
John Lavery’s years spent in France at the beginning of his career, between November 1881 and November 1884, were crucially formative. He had arrived in Paris with Glasgow companions, Alexander Roche, Alfred East and William Kennedy, his head filled with sentimental scenes of Regency trysts and pretty heroines, and gradually, during this time, under the influence of progressive painting, popular literary subject matter typified by pictures such as Heart for a Rose (A Conquest) (1882, Glasgow Museums, Fig.1) was discarded. This canvas, painted in 1882, and shown alongside the present later work, After the Dance, indicates the young painter’s reluctance at first to abandon the commercially successful romances which had made the London-Scots painters, John Pettie and William Quiller Orchardson, famous. Its floral symbolism, admired by conservative collectors, was an essential component and it survives into the later work in the girl’s corsage and headdress.
However, as a student in a foreign city with no family capital to draw on, the pressure to please the market remained intense even while pursuing his studies, and according to Percy Jacomb-Hood, Lavery was renowned at this time for ‘faking’ backgrounds to his atelier sketches ‘and making them into pictures which were bought by some dealer in Glasgow’ (GP Jacomb-Hood, MVO, With Brush and Pencil, 1925, p. 24). Yet, as he commenced After the Dance, his most ambitious painting to date, the young artist was beginning to develop new ideas. The transformation must extend from subject matter to technique and style: important pictures had more presence, were larger, and their handling was smoother and more sophisticated than anything he could master up to that point.
He had spent the spring term at the Atelier Julian where the talk was all about Naturalism, the new movement spearheaded by Jules Bastien-Lepage that applied principles of scientific empiricism to art and literature. Just as Emile Zola and Edmond de Goncourt were documenting the mundanities of ordinary life, so painters such as Edouard Manet and his pupil, Henri Gervex, were recording typical scenes of the boulevard and the boudoir. Naturalism, rural and urban, dominated the annual Salons, and augmenting these rich surveys of emerging talent, there were the dealers’ emporia in the rue La Fitte and the rue de Sèze where Paul Durand-Ruel stocked the Impressionists and Georges Petit exhibited Les jeunes, young English-speaking painters like John Singer Sargent and William Stott, who were in the new vanguard.
In his autobiography Lavery later recalled the powerful impression that first Salon experience of 1882 made upon him. One picture in particular stuck in his mind - Manet’s late masterpiece, Un bar aux Folies Bergère (1882, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, Fig. 2). What did this painting of a young woman looking out at the spectator mean? Was there a clue in the use of a large mirror, at the back of the bar to reflect the space around and behind the spectator? The intriguing idea that the man in the mirror was in fact the viewer was a clever one, and like Lepage’s Pas Mèche (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), which Lavery also remembered from this time, the single person in the painting looked directly at the viewer. The whole picture was a greeting, an exchange, or a form of address. It implied an immediate encounter that went beyond the explicit symbolism of roses and Regency costumes. Yet nevertheless, Lavery’s market was not Paris, but Glasgow, and although he realized that there were progressive collectors in the west of Scotland, they needed to be challenged. His jeune fille en fleurs, about to leave the ball was as much a French subject as an English one, and with it, the young Gervex had consolidated his reputation, three years before (Gervex, Retour du Bal, 1879, private collection, Fig. 3). It was this that Lavery would tackle at the end of 1882. The Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts exhibition opened each year at the beginning of February, so we may assume that After the Dance was begun towards the end of 1882, possibly over the Christmas recess at the atelier Julian.
Essentially a study of a forlorn young woman – a favourite, unidentified, auburn-haired model – posed parallel to the picture plane, After the Dance echoes the format of James McNeill Whistler’s most celebrated portrait (Arrangement in Grey and Black, no. 1, The Painter’s Mother, 1872, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Fig. 4).
In both instances the back wall contains a curtain, dado and picture-within-the-picture – but there the comparison ends, for Lavery accentuates the contemporary Morris-inspired décor and in place of Whistler’s print, is of course, a mirror, large enough to reflect Gervex’s lascivious bourgeois gentilhomme. Were it not for this clever insertion we would not realize that this fellow was standing at our elbow holding the girl’s cloak - and behind him, is an attendant, or procuress. Does the face of Lavery’s Flora, shrouded in a beguiling shadow, conceal a frown? The moment is Zolaesque. One thinks of the humiliated Comte de Muffat and the fickle heroine in Zola’s Nana (1978). As these questions hang in the air, the eye follows the fashionable wallpaper, and notes the ornate Venetian-style of the mirror, returning to details such as the hand holding the dance card. The formal simplicity of Lavery’s arrangement, albeit echoing Whistler, would in turn find echoes in Jacomb-Hood’s My Sister, 1886 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and even perhaps in William Orpen’s The Mirror, 1900 (Tate). Yet neither of these later examples quite matches the complexity of a picture that remains unique in the Lavery oeuvre. This was a painter who, like Manet, eschewed theory. However, both had the capacity to see beyond and beneath the glittering surface. As Edward Knoblock declared at the time of his death, he followed his instinct and ‘the ruling passion of his life’ was painting what was before his eyes (Knoblock, ‘John Lavery’, in Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Sir John Lavery RA, 1941, exhibition catalogue, Leicester Galleries, London, p. 3). That winding course was set in After the Dance.
KMc.
However, as a student in a foreign city with no family capital to draw on, the pressure to please the market remained intense even while pursuing his studies, and according to Percy Jacomb-Hood, Lavery was renowned at this time for ‘faking’ backgrounds to his atelier sketches ‘and making them into pictures which were bought by some dealer in Glasgow’ (GP Jacomb-Hood, MVO, With Brush and Pencil, 1925, p. 24). Yet, as he commenced After the Dance, his most ambitious painting to date, the young artist was beginning to develop new ideas. The transformation must extend from subject matter to technique and style: important pictures had more presence, were larger, and their handling was smoother and more sophisticated than anything he could master up to that point.
He had spent the spring term at the Atelier Julian where the talk was all about Naturalism, the new movement spearheaded by Jules Bastien-Lepage that applied principles of scientific empiricism to art and literature. Just as Emile Zola and Edmond de Goncourt were documenting the mundanities of ordinary life, so painters such as Edouard Manet and his pupil, Henri Gervex, were recording typical scenes of the boulevard and the boudoir. Naturalism, rural and urban, dominated the annual Salons, and augmenting these rich surveys of emerging talent, there were the dealers’ emporia in the rue La Fitte and the rue de Sèze where Paul Durand-Ruel stocked the Impressionists and Georges Petit exhibited Les jeunes, young English-speaking painters like John Singer Sargent and William Stott, who were in the new vanguard.
In his autobiography Lavery later recalled the powerful impression that first Salon experience of 1882 made upon him. One picture in particular stuck in his mind - Manet’s late masterpiece, Un bar aux Folies Bergère (1882, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, Fig. 2). What did this painting of a young woman looking out at the spectator mean? Was there a clue in the use of a large mirror, at the back of the bar to reflect the space around and behind the spectator? The intriguing idea that the man in the mirror was in fact the viewer was a clever one, and like Lepage’s Pas Mèche (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), which Lavery also remembered from this time, the single person in the painting looked directly at the viewer. The whole picture was a greeting, an exchange, or a form of address. It implied an immediate encounter that went beyond the explicit symbolism of roses and Regency costumes. Yet nevertheless, Lavery’s market was not Paris, but Glasgow, and although he realized that there were progressive collectors in the west of Scotland, they needed to be challenged. His jeune fille en fleurs, about to leave the ball was as much a French subject as an English one, and with it, the young Gervex had consolidated his reputation, three years before (Gervex, Retour du Bal, 1879, private collection, Fig. 3). It was this that Lavery would tackle at the end of 1882. The Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts exhibition opened each year at the beginning of February, so we may assume that After the Dance was begun towards the end of 1882, possibly over the Christmas recess at the atelier Julian.
Essentially a study of a forlorn young woman – a favourite, unidentified, auburn-haired model – posed parallel to the picture plane, After the Dance echoes the format of James McNeill Whistler’s most celebrated portrait (Arrangement in Grey and Black, no. 1, The Painter’s Mother, 1872, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Fig. 4).
In both instances the back wall contains a curtain, dado and picture-within-the-picture – but there the comparison ends, for Lavery accentuates the contemporary Morris-inspired décor and in place of Whistler’s print, is of course, a mirror, large enough to reflect Gervex’s lascivious bourgeois gentilhomme. Were it not for this clever insertion we would not realize that this fellow was standing at our elbow holding the girl’s cloak - and behind him, is an attendant, or procuress. Does the face of Lavery’s Flora, shrouded in a beguiling shadow, conceal a frown? The moment is Zolaesque. One thinks of the humiliated Comte de Muffat and the fickle heroine in Zola’s Nana (1978). As these questions hang in the air, the eye follows the fashionable wallpaper, and notes the ornate Venetian-style of the mirror, returning to details such as the hand holding the dance card. The formal simplicity of Lavery’s arrangement, albeit echoing Whistler, would in turn find echoes in Jacomb-Hood’s My Sister, 1886 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and even perhaps in William Orpen’s The Mirror, 1900 (Tate). Yet neither of these later examples quite matches the complexity of a picture that remains unique in the Lavery oeuvre. This was a painter who, like Manet, eschewed theory. However, both had the capacity to see beyond and beneath the glittering surface. As Edward Knoblock declared at the time of his death, he followed his instinct and ‘the ruling passion of his life’ was painting what was before his eyes (Knoblock, ‘John Lavery’, in Memorial Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Sir John Lavery RA, 1941, exhibition catalogue, Leicester Galleries, London, p. 3). That winding course was set in After the Dance.
KMc.