SIR JOHN LAVERY PAINTINGS FOR SALE & BIOGRAPHY

SIR JOHN LAVERY

British, 1856–1941

BIOGRAPHY
John Lavery was born in North Belfast in 1856 and baptized at St Patrick’s Church Belfast. He was the son of an impoverished publican “who drowned on an emigrant ship to America in search of a more profitable profession; Lavery's mother died of grief soon after. Orphaned at age three, Lavery was harshly but unsuccessfully disciplined by a stern aunt in county Down. At age eleven he was sent to another relative who owned a pawnshop in Scotland. After a return to Ireland, he worked in Glasgow for three years as an apprentice to a painter-photographer, managing to pay his own fees at the school of art there. His initial efforts to set out as an independent artist were aided by a felicitous fire in his studio, from which he collected £300 in insurance that got him to London, and on to the Académie Julian in Paris, where he was taught by William Adolphe Bouguereau. Later moving to the artist's colony at Grez-sur-Loing, where Nathaniel Hone the Younger and Jules Bastien-Lepage also worked, Lavery spent what Walter Shaw-Sparrow called his 'happiest days in France'. From 1883 Lavery began exhibiting in the French Salon, but he returned to Scotland to become a member of the Glasgow School of Painters, who helped spread the influence of French art in the British Isles. Lavery's The Tennis Match was a success first at the Royal Academy in 1886 and then at the Paris Salon of 1888, where it won him a Third Class Medal. Bought first by the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, it is today in the Aberdeen Art Gallery. In Paris it was admired by fellow Irishman George Moore, who wrote: ‘I do not know Mr. Lavery, I never heard anyone speak of him but it is my duty to find talent and proclaim it.’

“In London Lavery met Whistler, a major influence on his early work, in 1887, and a decade later he served as Vice President under Whistler's Presidency of the newly-formed International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers. Lavery also became good friends with the great French sculptor Rodin, whose portrait he painted.

“Lavery won bronze medals at successive Paris International Exhibitions in 1889 and 1900. In the latter year he showed in the Salon his handsome self-portrait Father and Daughter, which was bought by the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris (now Musée d'Orsay). He was elected to the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1907, knighted in 1918, became a Royal Academician in 1921, and received honorary doctorates from both Queen's University, Belfast (1935), and Trinity College, Dublin (1936). At age eighty-four he wrote 'with astonishing verve and frankness' his autobiography, The Life of a Painter.

“Lavery first visited Morocco with his friend R.B. Cunninghame Graham in the autumn of 1890 and was so charmed by the place that he purchased property in Tangier and returned almost annually. He showed at least fifteen Moroccan subjects at the Goupil Gallery in his exhibition of June, 1891, ten or more at the Leicester Galleries show of November 1904, while over a third of his sixty-six works on display in the Goupil Gallery in August 1908, were Eastern scenes.”

[James Thompson, ed., The East: Imagined, Experienced, Remembered – Orientalist Nineteenth Century Painting (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Ireland and National Museums & Galleries, Merseyside, 1988, p. 175]

Museum Collections
Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Belfast City Hall, Belfast
Berwick Museum & Art Gallery, Berwick-upon-Tweed
Birmingham Museums Trust, Birmingham
Bradford Museums and Galleries, Bradford
Brighton and Hove Museums, Brighton
British Museum, London
Burrell Collection, Glasgow
Burton Art Gallery and Museum, Burton
Bury Art Museum, Bury
Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford
Cecil Higgins Art Gallery
Colchester Town Hall, Colchester
Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork
Doncaster Mansion House, Doncaster
Dundee Art Galleries, Dundee
Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston upon Hull
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Fleming Collection, London
Girton College, University of Cambridge
Glasgow Museums Resource Center, Glasgow
Government Art Collection, London
Guildhall Art Gallery, London
Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield
Higgins At Gallery & Museum, Bedford
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Hunterian, University of Glasgow
Imperial War Museums, London
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
Kirkcaldy Galleries, Kirkcaldy
Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne
Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds
Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester
McLean Museum and Art Gallery, Greenock
Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate
Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbroug
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of London, London
Museum of the City of New York, New York
Museum of the Order of St. John, London
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
National Museum, Cardiff
National Portrait Gallery, London
National Trust, Chartwell
National Trust, Mount Stewart
National Trust, Sissinghurst Castle
National Trust, Waddesdon Manor, Aylesbury
Paisley Museum and Art Galleries, Paisley
Perth Art Gallery, Perth
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Queen’s University, Belfast
Rothe House, Kilkenny
Royal Air Force Museum, London
Royal Academy of Arts, London
Royal College of Music, London
Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels
Royal Scottish Academy of Art, Edinburgh
Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth
Sheffield Museums, Sheffield
Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton
Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead
Tate Britain, London
Towneley Hall Art Gallery & Museum, Burnley
Ulster Museum, Belfast
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum, Wimbledon
Yale Center for British Art, New Have, CT

Mark Murray Fine Paintings is a New York gallery specializing in buying and selling 19th century and early 20th century artwork.

Please contact us if you are interested in selling your Sir John Lavery paintings or other artwork from the 19th century and early 20th century.