A seated milkmaid

In 1879 a naval captain named Beddoes walked into Lavery's studio in Glasgow and asked the painter to give him painting lessons at Belmullet, County Mayo, where he was currently stationed. Lavery rose to the challenge and made his first trip to the West of Ireland, a landscape which, in his autobiography, he describes as 'desolate'. He records that when he arrived at Beddoes' house it seemed like 'the acme of comfort' after what was a harrowing trip of thirty or forty miles in a jaunting car. Lavery was deeply affected by the poverty of the Irish peasants and on one occasion attempted to paint a peasant woman on a roadway. He records that when he gave her a two-shilling piece for posing, she turned it over and over in her hand thinking that it was a foreign coin. (J. Lavery, The Life of the Painter, 1940, p. 199-200; Kenneth McConkey Sir John Lavery, Edinburgh, 1993, pp. 17-18).

The present painting of a milkmaid was painted on this trip in 1879 and may have been given by Lavery to Beddoes.

We are grateful to Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.