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拍品專文
When, for the first time, he strode up the beach with his belongings to Custom House at Tangier in January 1891, John Lavery’s life changed. An entrancing white city on a hilltop overlooking the sea and glistening in the sunshine, stood before him. So captured was he that for next three years this would be his winter retreat and creative wellspring. Career and reputation then intervened as opportunities arose in Europe and the United States that necessitated a permanent move from Glasgow to London. It was only in March 1906 that he and his old friends RB Cunninghame Graham and Walter Harris re-united at the Hotel Cecil in Tangier to plan their expedition to Fez. Harris, Times correspondent and permanent resident in Morocco is likely to have encouraged the painter to acquire a winter bolthole in the city – a villa called Dar-el-Midfah, or ‘The House of the Cannon’, on what was then known as Mount Washington, to the west of the Medina. The house acquired its name because lurking in the garden was an old rusting cannon from the early days of the Barbary pirates. This remained in place until the 1990s. The house, much altered, is now the private residence of a member of the Moroccan royal family.
Thereafter, every year until the Great War, Lavery aimed to spend at least three months at this holiday home with his teenage daughter, Eileen, escaping what one commentator described as the ‘dead formalism’ of the London studio (A. Stodart Walker, ‘The Art of John Lavery, RSA, ARA, etc’, The Studio, vol LXII, June 1914, p. 14.)
Lavery’s life changed for a second time when on 22 July 1909, at Brompton Oratory, he married Hazel Trudeau, a young widow from Chicago, with a five-year-old daughter named Alice. From the following winter, the Tangier menage included these three most important family members, all of whom are pictured in the present intimate veranda sketch. Elsewhere in Lavery’s work we find them on the beach, on the hilltop, in the garden, on horseback, or in Alice’s case, riding a donkey – in short leading the relaxed existence of those Edwardians holidaymakers of modest wealth.
The present work, simply inscribed, ‘Breakfast’, in the artist’s hand, was exhibited in Pittsburgh and Chicago in 1912. As in My Garden in Morocco, 1910 and Under the Palm Tree 1910 (both Private Collections), Lavery’s garden contained an actual ‘terrace’ where tea was served to visitors, at a distance from the main house, on the path down to his separate studio at Dar-el-Midfah. The present setting clearly represents the seaview-facing veranda, sometimes referred to as a ‘pergola’, as in one of the first large second period Tangier canvases of 1906, and this was the setting for many more private occasions (see Kenneth McConkey, Lavery On Location, 2023, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, pp. 102-103, 118-119).
Although sometimes worked to a high degree of finish, fresh spontaneous compositions like Breakfast on the Terrace, convey an ambiance that charms the eye. A casual impressionist beauty flashes from Hazel’s three-quarter-length gamboge jacket, stated in a few brilliant strokes, while Eileen, hatted in pink, turns away from the encroaching sunbeams. And young Alice? What can she be asking? “Can we go to the beach, Mummy?” Perhaps. Art can exist in such moments.
Kenneth McConkey
Thereafter, every year until the Great War, Lavery aimed to spend at least three months at this holiday home with his teenage daughter, Eileen, escaping what one commentator described as the ‘dead formalism’ of the London studio (A. Stodart Walker, ‘The Art of John Lavery, RSA, ARA, etc’, The Studio, vol LXII, June 1914, p. 14.)
Lavery’s life changed for a second time when on 22 July 1909, at Brompton Oratory, he married Hazel Trudeau, a young widow from Chicago, with a five-year-old daughter named Alice. From the following winter, the Tangier menage included these three most important family members, all of whom are pictured in the present intimate veranda sketch. Elsewhere in Lavery’s work we find them on the beach, on the hilltop, in the garden, on horseback, or in Alice’s case, riding a donkey – in short leading the relaxed existence of those Edwardians holidaymakers of modest wealth.
The present work, simply inscribed, ‘Breakfast’, in the artist’s hand, was exhibited in Pittsburgh and Chicago in 1912. As in My Garden in Morocco, 1910 and Under the Palm Tree 1910 (both Private Collections), Lavery’s garden contained an actual ‘terrace’ where tea was served to visitors, at a distance from the main house, on the path down to his separate studio at Dar-el-Midfah. The present setting clearly represents the seaview-facing veranda, sometimes referred to as a ‘pergola’, as in one of the first large second period Tangier canvases of 1906, and this was the setting for many more private occasions (see Kenneth McConkey, Lavery On Location, 2023, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, pp. 102-103, 118-119).
Although sometimes worked to a high degree of finish, fresh spontaneous compositions like Breakfast on the Terrace, convey an ambiance that charms the eye. A casual impressionist beauty flashes from Hazel’s three-quarter-length gamboge jacket, stated in a few brilliant strokes, while Eileen, hatted in pink, turns away from the encroaching sunbeams. And young Alice? What can she be asking? “Can we go to the beach, Mummy?” Perhaps. Art can exist in such moments.
Kenneth McConkey