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Lot Essay
Born in Belfast in 1856, the son of a wine merchant, Lavery was orphaned at the age of three and brought up by an uncle on a farm in Co. Down. After a rackety youth spent between Ireland and Scotland, he embarked on an artistic career, receiving his earliest training at the Haldane Academy in Glasgow and at Heatherley's in London. In November 1881 he set out for Paris to study at L'Académie Julian, then the mecca for so many British art students. Apart from a visit to Glasgow in the summer of 1882 to exhibit at the Glasgow Institute, he remained in France for the next four years, finally returning to his adopted city at the end of 1884.
Both the present picture and lot 17 date from the latter part of this intensely formative phase. During his first months in Paris, Lavery spent the daytime working from the life at Julian's. Here he was taught by two pillars of the academic establishment, Tony Robert-Fleury and an artist he particularly admired at this time, W. A. Bouguereau. In the evenings he frequented another studio, Colarossi's, kept by a retired model. The models there posed in costume, and the studies he made could be worked up into finished pictures suited to a conservative market at home.
When he returned to Paris towards the end of 1882, Lavery's work changed dramatically. Hitherto a conventional exponent of late Victorian genre, he emerged as an artist of real stature, capable of holding his own on the international stage. The development was closely associated with his discovery of Jules Bastien-Lepage, an artist only eight years his senior but already renowned in both France and Britain as the prophet of naturalism and plein-air painting. Bastien's controversial accounts of modern and historical subjects became of absorbing interest to Lavery and his student friends, while the limitations of Julian's and Bouguereau seemed more and more apparent.
Many years later, Lavery recalled the impact of Bastien's work, which, he said, 'took away his breath' when he first saw it. But naturalism was not the only aesthetic mode to excite his circle's interest. Puvis de Chavannes, whose painting Doux Pays won a medaille d'honneur at the Salon of 1882, was hardly less inspirational. One of Lavery's associates, the Anglo-Austrian artist Louis Welden Hawkins, applied to become Puvis' studio assistant in 1887, and many members of his expatriate set - William Stott of Oldham, the Scots Alexander Roche and Thomas Mille Dow, Lavery's fellow Irishman Frank O'Meara, and Lavery himself - were to betray Puvis' influence by their search for a rural arcadia and their endeavour to capture a mood of reverie, a sense of idyllic serenity and suspended time.
The present picture was one of the first in which Lavery sought to express his new aims and enthusiasm after his return to Paris in 1882. Instead of working all day at Julian's, he began to spend his afternoons in the countryside, painting from nature at St Cloud and Nogent-sur-Marne, and A Stranger was painted at Nogent in the spring of 1883. Stylistically the picture is comparable to certain works by Edward Stott, Alfred East, and other artists with whom Lavery was working at this time, creating spatial recession by using foreground foliage as a kind of screen to place the figures in the middle distance. The picture dates from about the same time as Les Deux Pêcheurs, a missing work with which Lavery scored his first success at the Salon in 1883, and the conception is similar to that of La Rentrée des Chèvres, another missing picture which he showed at the Salon the following year. Lavery's biographer Walter Shaw-Sparrow draws attention to these animal subjects that the artist found in villages outside Paris, commenting that the 'strong natural sympathy for animals' which his work exhibits in general seems to have been inspired during this 'transition period in France' (John Lavery and His Work, 1911, p. 47).
Both the present picture and lot 17 date from the latter part of this intensely formative phase. During his first months in Paris, Lavery spent the daytime working from the life at Julian's. Here he was taught by two pillars of the academic establishment, Tony Robert-Fleury and an artist he particularly admired at this time, W. A. Bouguereau. In the evenings he frequented another studio, Colarossi's, kept by a retired model. The models there posed in costume, and the studies he made could be worked up into finished pictures suited to a conservative market at home.
When he returned to Paris towards the end of 1882, Lavery's work changed dramatically. Hitherto a conventional exponent of late Victorian genre, he emerged as an artist of real stature, capable of holding his own on the international stage. The development was closely associated with his discovery of Jules Bastien-Lepage, an artist only eight years his senior but already renowned in both France and Britain as the prophet of naturalism and plein-air painting. Bastien's controversial accounts of modern and historical subjects became of absorbing interest to Lavery and his student friends, while the limitations of Julian's and Bouguereau seemed more and more apparent.
Many years later, Lavery recalled the impact of Bastien's work, which, he said, 'took away his breath' when he first saw it. But naturalism was not the only aesthetic mode to excite his circle's interest. Puvis de Chavannes, whose painting Doux Pays won a medaille d'honneur at the Salon of 1882, was hardly less inspirational. One of Lavery's associates, the Anglo-Austrian artist Louis Welden Hawkins, applied to become Puvis' studio assistant in 1887, and many members of his expatriate set - William Stott of Oldham, the Scots Alexander Roche and Thomas Mille Dow, Lavery's fellow Irishman Frank O'Meara, and Lavery himself - were to betray Puvis' influence by their search for a rural arcadia and their endeavour to capture a mood of reverie, a sense of idyllic serenity and suspended time.
The present picture was one of the first in which Lavery sought to express his new aims and enthusiasm after his return to Paris in 1882. Instead of working all day at Julian's, he began to spend his afternoons in the countryside, painting from nature at St Cloud and Nogent-sur-Marne, and A Stranger was painted at Nogent in the spring of 1883. Stylistically the picture is comparable to certain works by Edward Stott, Alfred East, and other artists with whom Lavery was working at this time, creating spatial recession by using foreground foliage as a kind of screen to place the figures in the middle distance. The picture dates from about the same time as Les Deux Pêcheurs, a missing work with which Lavery scored his first success at the Salon in 1883, and the conception is similar to that of La Rentrée des Chèvres, another missing picture which he showed at the Salon the following year. Lavery's biographer Walter Shaw-Sparrow draws attention to these animal subjects that the artist found in villages outside Paris, commenting that the 'strong natural sympathy for animals' which his work exhibits in general seems to have been inspired during this 'transition period in France' (John Lavery and His Work, 1911, p. 47).