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PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN SIR JOHN LAVERY, R.A., R.H.A., R.S.A. 1856-1941 CONVALESCENCE (IN THE APPLE ORCHARD)

signed and dated l.l.: J Lavery 1885

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

T.R. Ronaldson Esq., MD;
Sale, Sotheby's London, 21st October 1970, lot 61;
Fine Art Society, London, 1971;
Private Collection
EXHIBITED

Glasgow, Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, 1886, no.254 (as Convalescence;
London, Royal Society of British Artists, Summer Exhibition, 1887, no.173 (as Convalescence);
Paris, 1889 (?);
Glasgow, Scottish Exhibition, 1911 (lent by TM Ronaldson MD);
London, Grosvenor Gallery, A Retrospective Exhibition of the Works of John Lavery, 1880-1914, 1914, no.138 (as Convalescent, lent by TM Ronaldson MD)
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Walter Shaw Sparrow, John Lavery and his Work, 1911, pp. 73, 172;
Kenneth McConkey, Sir John Lavery RA, 1856-1941, exh. cat., Ulster Museum, Belfast and Fine Art Society, London 1984, p.31;
Kenneth McConkey, Sir John Lavery, Edinburgh 1993, p.40 (fig. 39)

CATALOGUE NOTE

In the early summer of 1885, before he began painting The Tennis Party, (Aberdeen Art Gallery), John Lavery returned to a favourite setting - an orchard by a river - and depicted figures under a thick canopy of blossom in sunlight. A girl sits on the grass reading, while her companion, wrapped in a shawl, sinks back into pillows on a wicker chair. Such a scene was enchanting. It carried ideas of filial loyalty alongside notions of health restored by the natural world. This may be a dutiful daughter reading to a relative, perhaps her mother. As industrial cities like Glasgow rapidly expanded in the nineteenth century, public health issues were hotly debated and while Lavery is unlikely to have thought deeply about these matters, he would have been generally aware of the popularity of images which struck the powerful relationship between nature newly in flower, and humanity revived. The significance of Pre-Raphaelite maidens resting in rose bowers, in Burne-Jones and Rossetti, to an earlier generation of painters and collectors, had not been lost. The secret, scented garden was associated with health and beauty. In 1885, listening to the gentle stream, inhaling the freshness of nature reborn and basking in the sun's heat, there was in Convalescence (In the Apple Orchard), a feast for the senses.

The present work, originally entitled Convalescence, was borrowed from its owner in 1914 for Lavery's retrospective exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, London, where the title was given as The Convalescent. It has sometimes been confused with Summertime (unlocated), Lavery's second Royal Society of British Artists exhibit of 1887. By the 1980s, when it was reproduced by Elgin Court Designs, it had acquired the title In the Apple Orchard. To avoid confusion, both titles are given here.

A year before Convalescence while he was working at Grez-sur-Loing, Lavery painted in the garden at the rear of his hotel, overlooking the river. The scene on this occasion included a washerwoman and her daughter, talking to a passing boatman, painted en plein air on a large square canvas, during the summer months. Before embarking on this ambitious work, he had produced a smaller, more spontaneous version, containing the traces of cherry blossom, largely omitted the exhibition-piece. Shown in Paisley and Glasgow at the beginning of 1885 entitled, On the Loing: An Afternoon Chat, this second, large canvas was retained by the artist and later donated to Belfast Art Gallery in 1929, where it is known as Under the Cherry Tree (Fig 1, Ulster Museum, Belfast). The significance of these two works lay more in the setting they portray than in their anecdotal subject matter. Lavery was less committed to peasant themes than his fellow-travellers in the Glasgow School and on his return to Scotland at the end of 1884, he quickly re-established his connections with the industrialist collectors of Paisley. The two versions of On the Loing: An Afternoon Chat were nevertheless his first explorations of the orchard-garden, a subject that although factually represented, contained echoes of aestheticism and mysticism. Lavery was as much aware of the Bastien-Lepage's Jeanne d'Arc écoutant les voix, 1880 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), as he was of Burne-Jones' Merlin and Nimue, 1877 (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight). Bastien's thesis picture, stripped of its history, showed a peasant girl almost submerged in foliage, concealing the ghostly saints who called her to arms. Whilst his Grez cherry tree in blossom has none of this, its spreading branches describe the space, and envelop that passing moment between the washerwoman and the boatman.

There were more discoveries to be made. As he returned to the theme, Lavery was excited by the complexity of painting figures in dappled sunlight. The girl sits with her back to the sun, her flaming hair picked out, as light falls on the back of her head and throws her face into shadow. Her companion's fine Paisley shawl and pillow are illuminated by dabs of pale lemon and white, as the sun filters through the branches, gently touching the lobe of her ear and the side of her cheek. To achieve such effects demanded acuity of observation - a quality that Lavery would not have found in Tissot's earlier, more graphic treatments of the theme (Fig 2). The picture places him more accurately with younger British and Irish painters such as Walter Osborne and George Clausen. However, while Osborne's Apple Gathering, Quimperlé, 1883 (Fig 3, National Gallery of Ireland), lacks the Lavery's lucidity, and Clausen's The Shepherdess 1885 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), posed in a flowering orchard, retains the rustic idiom of Bastien-Lepage, Lavery, in the present work, displays greater spontaneity. The contrast with his Glasgow School contemporaries could not be greater. James Guthrie's In the Orchard, (Private Collection, on loan to Glasgow City Art Galleries) being painted slightly later in 1885 retains the mechanical 'square brush' style and peasant subject matter of Bastien-Lepage. At this point, in Convalescence and The Tennis Party, Lavery had rejected the rustic for the subtle conventions and familial relationships of the literate and sporting bourgeoisie. In retrieving the full richness of his Grez experience, expressed in works like Woman with a Dog, Grez-sur-Loing (sold Sotheby's 18 May 2000, lot 102), Sewing in the Shade and La Pêcheuse (both Private Collections), he was looking back to studies of figures under trees by a river, and was moving towards a new subject matter identified with the leisure and recreational pursuits of his future clientele. He realized that such studies could be enriched by fresh colour harmonies that appeared as work on the canvas progressed. The thickly matted strokes of the foliage are an expression of this. His methods were akin to those of John Singer Sargent working on Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1887 (Tate Britain, London).

Like Sargent's later canvas, Convalescence (In the Apple Orchard) demonstrates the degree to which the mechanical application of paint in plein air sketching had been infiltrated by the freer style of the Impressionists. Although Lavery relied upon a substructure of drawing with a light sable brush at this period, the present work shows the degree to which that initial working might be corrected by concentrated, on-the-spot observation, enabling the whole ensemble to develop at once and in its entirety. We might for instance observe the upright sapling that frames the present composition on the left and the gnarled, encircling branches of the old tree in the background. These bend towards the right edge of the canvas, bringing the eye back round to the figures, who themselves are inscribed within as series of echoing arcs. Lavery was an intuitive and spontaneous composer.

The girl in the picture is almost certainly Eva Fulton, daughter of the Paisley wool manufacturer and local benefactor, James Fulton. Throughout the Victorian period, the Fultons were renowned for the manufacture of fine Paisley shawls. In 1850 Fulton's father had acquired the Glen estate near the town. His collection, donated to the Paisley Art Institute, included works by the Barbizon painters, Boudin, Corot and Lhermitte. A local benefactor, James Fulton threw open his picturesque river and waterfall, for annual concerts, at least one of which Lavery attended. It is likely that the present picture was painted there. Fulton commissioned Lavery to paint portraits of his daughters, Alice and Eva. Of the two, the painter was more attracted to Eva, easily identified by her shock of red hair tied back in a pony tail. She appears in a number of works at this time, notably in the watercolour and oil versions of He Won't Bite You 1885 (Private Collections). In Lavery's portrait of 1886 (Fig. 4), she teases her dog with a biscuit. It is likely that the figures in Convalescence (In the Apple Orchard) are the two central spectators in The Tennis Party (Fig. 5). Eva wears a pale blue dress and black stockings with her hair tied back, as in the present picture and the older woman, no longer convalescing, sits in what is probably the same wicker chair. Although fairly common, and familiar in the paintings of Tissot, this too has an interesting derivation. Lavery first painted it in the lost painting, Beg Sir!, 1885, his outdoor version of what became the sub-plot of Eva Fulton's portrait - a dog being teased.

Walter Shaw Sparrow, writing in 1911, recalled Convalescence as a 'good' picture, and made much of the fact that it was selected by Whistler to be shown in the Royal Society of British Artists spring exhibition in 1887, during his brief presidency. Lavery had met Whistler in London during the previous year, and was treated to an informal private rendition of his celebrated 'Ten O'Clock Lecture', the definitive expression of his aestheticism. Convalescence may not concur exactly with Whistler's vision of the riverside mists and dim skies of London, but its equally subtle harmonies derived from summer sunlight in a flowering orchard, were abundantly clear. A relationship could easily be struck with the work of Claude Monet, a painter who was to show at the following British Artists exhibition. Not surprisingly, having made such a shrill statement on the beauty of everyday experience, Lavery was to return to it in later years. The summer idyll, complete with flowering blossom, returned in Paisley Lawn Tennis Club, 1889, (Fig. 6, Renfrew Museums and Galleries) and it was resumed in A Garden in France, 1898 (Private Collection) and other works. These became the definitive statements of the lush Edwardian summer at the turn of the century, presenting a calm sunlit world in which the innocent abundance of nature mystically restored health and happiness to those who placed themselves under its protective canopy.

Kenneth McConkey