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Lot Essay
In a famous line, Siegfried Sassoon described the heroines of John Singer Sargent as ‘fashion-dated ghostesses’, whose glittering display in the artist’s memorial exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1926 only signalled the degree to which the world had utterly changed following the Great War. The bright young women of the twenties, newly enfranchised, were freed from convention and it was up to the portrait painter to find new bearings. Armageddon on the Western Front had sundered the present from the recent past. Clothes, coiffure and make-up now differed radically from those adopted by the Edwardian grande dame, as much as the old Whistlerian protocols of the full-length portrait were replaced by more immediate and informal forms of presentation.
Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in John Lavery’s portrait of Miss Rosemary Hope-Vere and Bacchus. Daughter of Lt-Col James Charles Hope-Vere, of Craigie Hall, Kirkmuir Hill near Lanark, Rosemary Marguerite Hope-Vere (1907-1990) became one of the artist’s subjects just before her ill-fated marriage to Major John Drury Boteler Drury-Lowe in 1930. At the time of the marriage, Rosemary was having an affair with Quintin Holland Gilbey, a young Lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards, and when she became pregnant the couple eloped to Paris together. She and Drury-Lowe were divorced at the beginning of 1933, when she immediately married Gilbey. None of this was obvious as she sat for the painter in 1929.
Although we do not know how Lavery came into contact with the Hope-Veres, it is possible that he may have met Rosemary’s elder brother, Edward, who had worked at the British Legation in Tangier as a member of the Diplomatic Service before the war. Connections may well have been made at North Berwick during the 1920s since the artist presented The First Green, North Berwick, 1921 (private collection), one of his best golf pictures, to Rosemary on the occasion of her marriage. The fact that during the sittings he produced two portraits of equal size also tends to confirm that he enjoyed the company of this vivacious young woman – Miss Rosemary Hope-Vere (private collection), being shown at the Royal Academy, while the present work was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy.
Both show the sitter dressed in pink against a green backdrop, while the present canvas also contains Rosemary’s lapdog, ‘Bacchus’. Painting young women with their dogs was something of a speciality for Lavery. At the beginning of his career, Miss Eva Fulton, 1886 (Paisley Art Institute), tempts her pet retriever with a biscuit, and occasionally thereafter, cairns, gundogs, bulldogs and Jack Russells are featured, while in The Artist’s Studio, 1910-13 (National Gallery of Ireland) in emulation of Velazquez, he painted his own mastiff, ‘Rodney Stone’. Here however, the ensemble is enhanced by a recumbent Pekinese, the fashionable pooch of the day – its presence adding to the informality of the occasion, and giving no sign of the drama that lay ahead.
We are very grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for preparing this catalogue entry.
Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in John Lavery’s portrait of Miss Rosemary Hope-Vere and Bacchus. Daughter of Lt-Col James Charles Hope-Vere, of Craigie Hall, Kirkmuir Hill near Lanark, Rosemary Marguerite Hope-Vere (1907-1990) became one of the artist’s subjects just before her ill-fated marriage to Major John Drury Boteler Drury-Lowe in 1930. At the time of the marriage, Rosemary was having an affair with Quintin Holland Gilbey, a young Lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards, and when she became pregnant the couple eloped to Paris together. She and Drury-Lowe were divorced at the beginning of 1933, when she immediately married Gilbey. None of this was obvious as she sat for the painter in 1929.
Although we do not know how Lavery came into contact with the Hope-Veres, it is possible that he may have met Rosemary’s elder brother, Edward, who had worked at the British Legation in Tangier as a member of the Diplomatic Service before the war. Connections may well have been made at North Berwick during the 1920s since the artist presented The First Green, North Berwick, 1921 (private collection), one of his best golf pictures, to Rosemary on the occasion of her marriage. The fact that during the sittings he produced two portraits of equal size also tends to confirm that he enjoyed the company of this vivacious young woman – Miss Rosemary Hope-Vere (private collection), being shown at the Royal Academy, while the present work was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy.
Both show the sitter dressed in pink against a green backdrop, while the present canvas also contains Rosemary’s lapdog, ‘Bacchus’. Painting young women with their dogs was something of a speciality for Lavery. At the beginning of his career, Miss Eva Fulton, 1886 (Paisley Art Institute), tempts her pet retriever with a biscuit, and occasionally thereafter, cairns, gundogs, bulldogs and Jack Russells are featured, while in The Artist’s Studio, 1910-13 (National Gallery of Ireland) in emulation of Velazquez, he painted his own mastiff, ‘Rodney Stone’. Here however, the ensemble is enhanced by a recumbent Pekinese, the fashionable pooch of the day – its presence adding to the informality of the occasion, and giving no sign of the drama that lay ahead.
We are very grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for preparing this catalogue entry.