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Lot Essay
In 1925, Lavery was invited by Joseph Duveen to tour his highly successful exhibition of portrait-interiors in the United States.1 The exhibition began on 30 November at the Duveen Galleries, New York and travelled to the Vose Galleries in Boston at the end of December, before touring to Philadelphia and Harrisburg. Lavery, his wife, Hazel and step-daughter, Alice, together with their maid and valet, sailed from Southampton on the RMS Mauretania to attend the opening. On arrival they switched hotels to the Ambassador after Lavery was advised to stay there or the Ritz if he wished to be taken seriously.2 The exhibition was a great success and complimentary articles were published in Art News and the American Magazine of Art, praising Lavery's 'dexterity in the suggestion of atmosphere' and 'insight' which only comes from being deeply embedded in the world he was representing. Only the spiteful Joseph Pennell, who had been envious of Whistler's close relationship with Lavery as president and vice-president respectively of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, was critical.3
During the visit, he executed a number of portrait commissions that had been arranged on his behalf, and on his return to London in March 1926, told a reporter that he had painted no less than 15 millionaires, declining to name them because 'they were just ordinary millionaires'.4 At least five of these canvases were 'portrait interiors', and one, The Library, 58 East 68th Street, was sent to the forthcoming Royal Academy summer exhibition. So successful was his first American expedition that Lavery secured further commissions, necessitating a return trip the following winter.
The Laverys again sailed to New York, this time on the Aquatania on 6 November 1926. The painter had three or four weeks' work in the city, followed by two weeks in Boston, before they decamped to Florida where they stayed at the famous Breakers Hotel, Palm Beach for the rest of the winter.5 Travelling without Alice on this occasion, Hazel Lavery was apprehensive about the trip as this was to be the first time she and her daughter would be parted for a lengthy period. Although an exhibition of Lavery's work was staged at Whitehall, Palm Beach, this part of the trip, unlike the visits to northern cities, was treated as a holiday. It did not however, on this occasion, exclude the possibility of work and the return to Britain and included bathing, beach and tennis pictures. Hazel was critical of her country of birth, although, in a letter to Thomas Bodkin she confessed that 'John is very successful there, this time especially ...'6.
During these winter trips, Lavery executed at least two canvases from his hotel windows overlooking The Pond at the south-east corner of Central park. One, a day-time scene, depicts the right hand side of The Pond, looking towards Fifth Avenue, while the second, the present work, shows both banks, looking towards the Gapstow Bridge with The Mall and the Bethesda Fountain in the gathering gloom, beyond (figs. 1 and 2).7
This rustic stone structure at the north end of the pond was built in 1896 to replace an earlier wooden construction. The sun's last rays catch the sides of skyscrapers on the Upper West Side. Lavery's New York nocturne would be almost abstract, were it not for the tiny dots of figures, lamps and distant buildings. These two Central Park landscapes of 1926 are unique in Lavery's oeuvre. Apart from his Palm Beach suite and the Hollywood sequence in the late 1930s, his American body of work is small, and confined to portraits and portrait-interiors. There are as a result, no obvious comparisons for Central Park, New York, Evening - even in the work of Lavery's contemporaries.
Despite the efforts of Joseph Pennell and the photographer, Alfred Steiglitz to transform it through a Whistlerian haze, few European artists who visited New York before the advent of abstraction, found it picturesque. Even Jamesian Americans returning 'crammed with guide-book and catalogue culture' often failed to respond to the beauty of the lower bay - 'more shimmering' than Venice and 'more magical' than London.8 Lavery's American painter contemporaries, such as William Merrit Chase, Childe Hassam, William Glackens and Maurice Prendergast had all recorded the city, including Central Park.9 Indeed, park scenes, like those of Manet and the Impressionists were icons of modernity. However it was only with Willard Leroy Metcalf's Early Spring Afternoon, Central Park, 1911 (The Brooklyn Museum, Frank L. Babbott Fund), that a comparable aerial view was achieved.10 Here the particular quality of sunlight illuminating the buildings of Fifth Avenue anticipates Central Park from the Ambassador rather than the present work.
What does Lavery bring to the iconography of the park in his 1926 nocturne? His facture is far from Impressionist and his palette - cool greens, greys and browns - is drawn from Velásquez rather than Monet. However, looking out over the pond, to the Gapstow Bridge, he must have visually recalled the motifs of Japanese art. Filtered through western consciousness, the tiny bridges, strange promontories, twinkling lights and intense atmosphere of the Japanese must have returned to him as he looked out towards the Upper West Side on a winter evening in 1926.11 Lifted above the honking horns and spluttering charabancs, Gotham city was glorious.
1 Portrait Interiors by Sir John Lavery RA was held at the Leicester Galleries, London in October 1925. In addition to his highly successful agency selling 18th Century portraits to American clients, Duveen introduced a number of British artists to the American audience in the twenties, the first being Ambrose McEvoy in 1920. He was one of the first to recognise that contemporary British art was not recognised abroad - particularly in the United States. See Sir J. Duveen, Thirty Years of British Art, Studio Special Autumn Number, 1930, p. 95.
2 K. McConkey, Sir John Lavery, Edinburgh, 1993, p. 174, quoting from J. Lavery, The Life of a Painter, London, 1940, p. 225. He was told that he must appear 'as though money were no object'.
3 Pennell noted to Butler Wood, in a letter dated 3 January 1926, 'Here we have Sir RA etc. etc. Lavery among us, but I have not seen him, or for a long while noted at what hotel he is advertised to be stopping - but he has not use for mere artists ...' quoted in E. R. Pennell, The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell, vol. 2, 1930, p. 340.
4 K. McConkey, 1993, p. 174, note 15. He added that in America '... everyone is a millionaire ... and one needed to be a millionaire many times over before one counted there'.
5 It is likely that on this second visit the Laverys stayed at the Plaza Hotel on Grand Army Plaza (see note 7). Lavery painted the portraits of Mrs Frank Joseph Fahey (sold Sotheby's, 16 May 2002, Lot 152), Harriet Taft Hayward and Mary Elizabeth Hayward in Boston in 1926 (sold Christie's, 28 October 2004, Lot 151 & 152).
6 Quoted in McConkey, 1993, p. 174, note 16.
7 Lists of pictures valued for probate by Christie's in 1942, indicate the title of the daytime picture as Central Park from the Plaza. This suggests that it was painted on the artist's return visit in November 1926, while the present picture is more likely to have been executed from the Ambassador on the first occasion.
8 J. Pennell, 'New York', in C. Holme, ed., Sketching Grounds, 1909 (Offices of The Studio), pp. 131-2. In addition to his chapter in Sketching Grounds, Pennell's lithographs of New York appeared in The Art Journal, 1911, pp. 161-4.
9 W. H. Gerdts, Impressionist New York, New York, 1994, pp. 125-147. Gerdts illustrates Colin Campbell Cooper's Central Park, 1927-31, which shows a tall apartment building called the Oliver Cromwell, on West 72nd Street which was under construction at the time when the present picture was painted (p. 144, illustrated p. 143).
10 E. de Veer and R. J. Boyle, Sunlight and Shadow, The Life and Art of Willard L. Metcalf, New York, 1987, pp. 217-9.
11 Lavery had painted in the Japanese garden of Sir Patrick Ford, at Westerdunes in Scotland, in 1921.
K.M.
During the visit, he executed a number of portrait commissions that had been arranged on his behalf, and on his return to London in March 1926, told a reporter that he had painted no less than 15 millionaires, declining to name them because 'they were just ordinary millionaires'.
The Laverys again sailed to New York, this time on the Aquatania on 6 November 1926. The painter had three or four weeks' work in the city, followed by two weeks in Boston, before they decamped to Florida where they stayed at the famous Breakers Hotel, Palm Beach for the rest of the winter.
During these winter trips, Lavery executed at least two canvases from his hotel windows overlooking The Pond at the south-east corner of Central park. One, a day-time scene, depicts the right hand side of The Pond, looking towards Fifth Avenue, while the second, the present work, shows both banks, looking towards the Gapstow Bridge with The Mall and the Bethesda Fountain in the gathering gloom, beyond (figs. 1 and 2).
This rustic stone structure at the north end of the pond was built in 1896 to replace an earlier wooden construction. The sun's last rays catch the sides of skyscrapers on the Upper West Side. Lavery's New York nocturne would be almost abstract, were it not for the tiny dots of figures, lamps and distant buildings. These two Central Park landscapes of 1926 are unique in Lavery's oeuvre. Apart from his Palm Beach suite and the Hollywood sequence in the late 1930s, his American body of work is small, and confined to portraits and portrait-interiors. There are as a result, no obvious comparisons for Central Park, New York, Evening - even in the work of Lavery's contemporaries.
Despite the efforts of Joseph Pennell and the photographer, Alfred Steiglitz to transform it through a Whistlerian haze, few European artists who visited New York before the advent of abstraction, found it picturesque. Even Jamesian Americans returning 'crammed with guide-book and catalogue culture' often failed to respond to the beauty of the lower bay - 'more shimmering' than Venice and 'more magical' than London.
What does Lavery bring to the iconography of the park in his 1926 nocturne? His facture is far from Impressionist and his palette - cool greens, greys and browns - is drawn from Velásquez rather than Monet. However, looking out over the pond, to the Gapstow Bridge, he must have visually recalled the motifs of Japanese art. Filtered through western consciousness, the tiny bridges, strange promontories, twinkling lights and intense atmosphere of the Japanese must have returned to him as he looked out towards the Upper West Side on a winter evening in 1926.
K.M.