The Southern Sea

'Part of the fascination of Tangier for Lavery was in the opportunity it provided for painting seascapes. From the hills around the city he could look down upon the bay (see lot 51), look across the Straits of Gibraltar and to the southern sea in the approaches. The interest of these scenes lay in the angle of the viewpoint and the sense of spatial transition contained in subtle changes of hue from foreground, to middle distance, to background. Lavery was concentrated upon the variations of light, atmosphere and time of day which led to fleeting and, as here, vivid colour harmonies. The bold clotted pigment in the present work suggests that it may be one of the painter's later seascapes, when the strong impasto of Courbet provides a more reasonable precedent than the thin fugitive effects of Whistler'.
(Kenneth McConkey, private correspondence, 1999).