An Irish Impressionist: Lavery on Location, Edinburgh review - 'He was a conformist, not a radical'

Some of the pictures in this exhibition hint at the more exciting painter Lavery might have become, but in the end – as the artist himself put it – he spent “too much time trying to please” and not enough time “making enemies”, writes Duncan Macmillan

An Irish Impressionist: Lavery on Location, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh ****

Moyna Flannigan, Space Shuffle, Collective, Edinburgh ****

An Irish Impressionist: Lavery on Location is the title of the National Gallery’s major summer show this year, but as a title it does beg a few questions. To start with, Lavery’s Irishness was moot. He was born in Belfast, Ireland certainly before partition. Being an “Irish Impressionist”, however, suggests that his art was somehow Irish which really it was not. He moved to Scotland as a boy and his artistic beginnings were in Glasgow. A contemporary remarked of his inclusion in an exhibition of Irish art that “Mr Lavery is so identified with Scotland that one scarcely looks for him in an Irish exhibition.” This exhibition does come to us from Ireland, however. Clearly such doubts are now set aside. In fact, his art really became as cosmopolitan as he did himself. In his later career, he was a celebrity who moved among a wealthy international set.

Installation view of An Irish Impressionist: Lavery on Location PIC: Neil Hanna

“On Location” in the title, too, is a bit doubtful. It is clearly a cinematic reference. Late in life Lavery did go to Holywood, where he painted Shirley Temple and tried to paint Leslie Howard and Moira Shearer on set in Romeo and Juliet. Perhaps he himself saw his art as somehow cinematic. Some of his paintings of the First World War, like Wounded, London Hospital, 1915, or Daylight Raid from my Studio Window, a painting a dogfight over London in 1917, do also have a sort of newsreel quality, but it is more because of the subject than anything intrinsic to his art. This subtitle does, however, allow the exhibition to be organised thematically by place and subject as, for instance, Lavery in France, Lavery the War Artist, Lavery and Scotland.

Lavery’s life was certainly a rags to riches story. He was an orphan shipped to Scotland to go to school. Later apprenticed to a photographer in Glasgow, he discovered his artistic talent more or less by accident and then went to drawing classes in the morning before work. He began to exhibit, had some modest success and in 1881, somehow keeping himself by selling “pot-boilers”, he managed to take himself to Paris in the company of other young Glasgow artists to study at the Atelier Julian.

In 1883 however he moved from Paris to Grez-sur-Loing, an artists’ colony on the edge of the Fontainebleau Forest described by Robert Louis Stevenson as "pretty to see, merry to inhabit.” Lavery painted pictures there like The Bridge at Grez, or On the Loing; an Afternoon Chat, both from 1884. In the former picture a man in a single scull rests on his oars and two women, one with a bright orange parasol, sit in a rowing boat beside the massive arches of the bridge. In the latter picture, a woman and her daughter chat with a boatman under spring trees with the bridge and river beyond. These tranquil pictures are among the most beautiful in the show. Cool and tonal, they are in the essentially conservative style of Bastien-Lepage, then the hight of fashion. Nearly 20 years later, back in Grez, Lavery painted the Bridge at Grez, a similar scene with two women in a boat beside the bridge. The palette he has used is slightly richer and the light a bit brighter, showing some awareness of the revolution in painting that had taken place, but it’s still essentially tonal and a long way from being Impressionist.

The International Exhibition in Glasgow in 1888 gave Lavery his break. He exhibited Dawn After the Battle of Langside in the Fine Art Pavilion. An atmospheric history picture, it shows the melancholy, defeated queen sitting in semi-darkness by the dying embers of a camp fire. He painted a number of small, on-the-spot scenes like The Glasgow Exhibition, Twilight, The Dutch Cocoa House and The Cigar Seller and, in addition, a portrait of Daniel Santiagoe from Sri Lanka, a curry specialist and early celebrity cook. These paintings, apparently 50 in all, brought him to the attention of the city fathers who commissioned The State Visit of Queen Victoria to Glasgow, a grand, multi-portrait set-piece (not in the exhibition.) Using photographs, it took him two years to complete. It is not exactly cinematic, but does rather align him with the establishment. So too did the sale to the French state in 1900 of Père et Fille, his grand self-portrait with his daughter, Eileen, given a wall to itself here.

Florida in Winter, by Sir John Lavery PIC: Courtesy of National Museums NI, Ulster Museum Collection

Lavery’s first wife, Kathleen, mother of Eileen who became his constant companion, died in 1891. Then in 1895, Lavery left Glasgow, buying a house in Cromwell Road, London. At the same time however, following a fashion begun by Arthur Melville, he began to visit North Africa and then bought a house in Tangier. He seems to have been otherwise untouched by Melville’s example, however, which was such an inspiration to some of his Glasgow friends, unless perhaps in his vertiginous Tangier from the Hotel Continental. This is a striking picture which hints at a possibly more exciting painter than he was to become. It was in North Africa that he did paint some of his best work, however, particularly a series of luminous seascapes. Even here, though light is his subject, the Impressionist label doesn’t really fit. Windy Day, a sunlit painting of his daughter on a breezy beach, does echo Monet, but one of the most beautiful of this group, The Southern Sea, from 1910, apparently painted on a tinted ground – a white ground was the hallmark of Impressionism – seems to be inspired more by Constable. When later on he did try a spot of real Impressionism as in Spring in a Riviera Garden, for instance, it’s actually a bit of a mess.

Latterly, Lavery really was the painter of the Beau Monde. Hazel in Black and Gold, a full-length portrait of his second wife, Hazel, is as swish a glamour portrait as one could wish to see. A picture of his friend Winston Churchill painting by the Mediterranean is also rather beautiful, if in a different way, but some of the other society paintings such as Lord Duveen at Home are positively boring. The artist’s own reflection on his life is perhaps an apt but rather sad epitaph: he felt he had spent “too much time trying to please” and not enough “making enemies.” He was a conformist, not a radical, or if he was a radical at all, he was the conservatives’ radical, a prosperous – he left the equivalent of £4 million – but ultimately unsatisfactory place for an artist to be.

In a very different mood at Collective, Moyna Flannigan’s Space Shuffle is a long painting of a moonscape in Barbie pink inhabited by ghostly horses, planes and disembodied female figures. The references, we are told, are to civilisations seen across space time. Facing this is an elaborate mobile of little things on wires that recalls the work of Alexander Calder and his friend Miró. A second mobile is a wire frame in the form of rough cube supporting a cut-out that is at once a horse and female face. It is all a bit whimsical, but the artist, we are told, invites us to slow down, to look and to see which, I suppose, is fair enough after you have climbed Calton Hill to see it all.

An Irish Impressionist until 27 October; Moyna Flannigan until 16 September