Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Some wear on cover. Softcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> With no independent means or family to support his career in its early stages Lavery was forced to be an opportunist. He more than any of his Glasgow contemporaries had to live by his products. He had to produce salcable work. Lavery was fortunate in that the community which gave him early patronage was also interested in avant-garde European styles of painting His experience in France drew him away from stale Victorian potboilers and led him to a more widely appreciated decorative naturahsm that synthesised the influence of Bastien-Lepage and Whistler. Lavery’s painting intuitively developed towards the exploration of the aesthetic value of the sketch. He did not produce elaborate study drawings as other artists of his generation did nor did he carefully plan for compositional novelty. His method became one of “premier coup” of seeing and recording directly and with self possession. Compositional flaws would often necessitate complete revision. Advance preparation when it was made was in the form of small oil sketches that minimised some of the risks in large pictures but these are often complete statements in themselves. The practice of making small oil sketches of larger compositions began in the 1880s with works like Under the Cherry Tree (nos. 10 and 11) and was still in currency fifty years later in the Portrait of Diana Dickenson (No. 109). The advice of Bastien-Lepage to study figures in movement and to cultivate a visual memory became an essential precept for even when the subject was a static portrait the goal was to convey the vivacity of the sitter and avoid producing a lifeless effigy. In the effort to apprehend the sitter’s personality the essential qualities required of the artist were alertness and concentration. He had according to Cunninghame Graham ‘learned the trick of working quite unconcerned by anything that passes in the world Lavery could paint anything anywhere and to some extent this was part of the challenge. He was one of the first artists to take his painting kit up in a kite balloon and he graphically records setting up his casel on the impacted ice at Scapa Flow im January 1918 or warding off tribesmen in Morocco in 1907. Such circumstances militated against technical flourish. Lavery’s primary identity was as an Edwardian society portraitist who was described by Camille Mauclair as ‘avant tout un feministe. “Obviously in those days a termost was simply a lover of women. He created the archetypal image of Edwardian female beauty but he could respond to different kinds of personality as the fornndable Cardinal Logue (no. 94) proves. The phenomenon of society portraiture is difficult for us to understand to-day. The society represented was that of the wealthy and titled and particularly in his portraits of society hostesses. (LL)