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Dimensions: 86.5 by 112cm., 34 by 44in.

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Provenance: VARIOUS PROPERTIES

J Davey & Sons, Liverpool
Private collection, Birmingham, purchased from the above, April 1946 (for £75)

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Notes: Writing in 1926, Desmond MacCarthy dubbed Lavery's interiors 'temples of memory.' He looked back to the rooms of his youth, recalled how much had changed since the 1880s and reflected upon the degree to which people recreate themselves in their immediate surroundings. By the time MacCarthy was penning his essay, the curiosity of the privileged view into someone else's space was something which had been exhaustively discussed. MacCarthy did not need to allude to Lavery's lifelong engagement with the subject and the fact that he had been producing interiors for forty years.

At the beginning of his career in the 1880s Lavery executed several important studio interiors with female sitters playing the piano. Between the Sittings (see McConkey, Sir John Lavery, Canongate Press, Edinburgh, 1993, p.23), a work of c.1882, shows his then current model practicing while she posed for one of his costume pieces. The chairs in the room are Victorian and mock-medieval. The upright piano with two brass candle sconces, a familiar studio prop, reappears in A Visit to the Studio, 1885 (fig.1, see also McConkey, Sir John Lavery R.A., 1856-1941, Fine Art Society, London and Ulster Museum, Belfast, exhibition catalogue, 1984, p.28) this time in the background. This canvas shows the model browsing in a book as she waits for her sitting.

Finale fits into the sequence at this point and may be dated c.1885-7 for the following reasons. By this date the furniture in Lavery's portraits and interiors had become 'aesthetic' in the sense that heavy, ornate pieces were replaced by 'stick-back' Morris-style chairs as in the present example. Here the chair, a Sussex-style corner chair, is a variant of that produced by Morris & Co from the mid-1860s, ebonised with a rush seat, manufactured to a design attributed to Ford Madox Brown. It, or others of its type, can be seen in portraits such as A French Girl, 1887, and Lady in Black, c.1887 (see McConkey, 1993, p.48).

The beaten copper plant holder, ornate mirror and Japanese fan are also worth noting. The first and second were common furnishing items seen in contemporary paintings by Solomon J. Solomon, William Merritt Chase and Mihaly Munkacsy. An elaborate Venetian mirror appears in the background of Lavery's earlier After the Dance, 1883 (see McConkey, 1993, p.22).

The fan alludes to Lavery's new 'aesthetic' ambitions. Similar fans decorate the background of A Girl in Black, 1887, a work which in the frontal positioning of its Japanned settee, also a Morris derivative, is comparable to the piano in Finale, if more sketchy. The formality is consistent with Lavery's work after his meeting with Whistler in 1886. The fan in this instance presents one of a series of brilliant touches of blue ranging from cineraria to cerulean, which play across the horizontal grids formed by the piano and chair, like notes on sheet music.

The model in Finale is likely to be that in Lady wearing a Ruff, 1887, a costume-piece study which may relate to Lavery's then current 'Mary Queen of Scots' portraits. Her heavy taffeta dress with a high collar could be considered mock-Tudor. Lavery evidently delighted in the shape it created against the dark colours of the polished floor and piano. It was this which he replicated as part of the design for the celebratory dance programme which he produced for the Grand Costume Ball at Glasgow Art Club on 29th November 1889 (coll. Glasgow Art Club; McConkey, 1993, pp.62-4). In this unique canvas, a huge palette is propped up behind the younger woman, advertising 'Dance at the Art Club'.

However, what distinguishes Finale from the other piano pictures of the 1880s is the precision with which it has been realised. Lavery applies the square brush technique of the ateliers with a rigour seen only in his paintings at Grez-sur-Loing. In this he was clearly matching himself against the Salon masters, as much as against Whistler. Bastien-Lepage, whom Lavery admired, had begun the process of leading painters into a form of naturalism which was often seen to be in competition with photography. By the mid-eighties the salon was dominated by high resolution renderings of sophisticated interiors by artists like Boldini, Beruad, Stevens and Duez, and this spread internationally to the likes of the American, Chase and Hungarian, Munkacsy. This, rather than the works of his rivals in the Glasgow School, provides the context for Finale and declares the international, as opposed to regional ambitions of its maker.

We are very grateful to Kenneth McConkey for permission to use his cataloguing of this lot as above. As a further note on composition: Professor McConkey refers above to Lavery's meeting with Whistler in 1886. 'Japonisme' was the rage throughout western Europe in the 1880s, thanks in no small part to both Whistler, and to Claude Monet (the Frenchman famously painted his wife Camille swathed head to toe in a heavily embroidered kimono, amidst a cloud of painted fans, fig.2, 1876, coll. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). The fashion permeated every level of artistic society, whether manifest as a female prediliction for the type of fan seen here, as a popular style of furnishing veneer, or as the basis for innovative pictorial composition. Japanese compositions, painted onto silk or built up in lacquer, made dramatic use of assymetry. Eastern artists were unafraid to exploit empty space to powerful effect. This was in contrast to traditional western notions of design. Such minimalist treatments bonded well with Impressionist innovations in the notation of light and space that were also gaining currency in France. Whistler's celebrated Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Artist's Mother (fig.3, 1871, coll. The Louvre) is an oft-quoted example of this Eastern influence. Degas' The Rehearsal of 1874 (fig.4, coll. Glasgow Museums, Burrell Collection) bears still closer comparison with Finale. In both paintings a substantial, roughly diamond-shaped, expanse of polished wooden floor takes up a key half of the foreground, and a quarter of the picture plane overall. In his catalogue of Impressionism in Britain, McConkey notes that 'it may be assumed that The Rehearsal became familiar to members of the circle of Jacques Emile Blanche [of whom Lavery was one] since it was acquired by him in 1888. It has always been regarded as one of Degas' most daring compositions, on account of the cropping of the figures on either side of the picture and the large empty area of floor in the centre' (Yale University Press in association with the Barbican, London, 1995, p.118). It may be that Lavery himself had seen The Rehearsal prior to Blanche's acquisition, as Finale was in progress. George Moore certainly drew parallels between Degas and Lavery in his appreciation of the latter's 1885 work The Tennis Party (coll. Aberdeen Art Gallery). Whether or not it is possible to trace a direct line of influence between two specific pictures here, both artists can be seen as responding alike to the myriad sources of visual inspiration in Paris at this time.