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拍品专文
Few paintings describe the Edwardian Orientalist more succinctly than Lavery’s little portrait of the forty-year-old Walter Harris. Garbed in brown leather gaiters, jodhpurs, grey linen jacket and toupee he has stepped from the pages of Rider Haggard, GA Henty or TE Lawrence. Nonchalance, geniality and wit are immediately evident in an individual who embraced Arab culture to the point where he would frequently be found in sandals and burnous.
Walter Burton Harris (1866-1933) was the son of a Quaker shipping insurance broker (J. Chandler, ‘Afterword’ in W.B. Harris, Morocco That Was, (1921), ed., 2002, pp. 233-245). His mother was Scots and independently wealthy, and the family lived on the Chelsea Embankment as neighbours of Whistler and Oscar Wilde, while their son attended Harrow School. He could easily have slipped into the world of youthful aesthetes had he not abandoned his studies at Cambridge University to travel, and at the age of nineteen, discovered Tangier where, on an allowance of £180 a year, he could live comfortably. Within a few years Harris was sending colourful accounts of his travels to English journals along with lengthier pieces on Moroccan politics. The enormous strategic importance of Morocco, and Tangier in particular, meant that it was a hotbed of international intrigue and Harris had his ear to the ground. Such was his depth of understanding of international affairs that he would eventually be appointed Times correspondent (Harris received a full contract from The Times 1906; prior to this he had been given a monthly stipend).
The receipt of a legacy in 1894 enabled him to construct the Villa Harris with its splendid gardens and unruly peacocks, on the route de Malabata, to the east of Medina (W.B Harris, ‘In a Moorish Garden’, The Saturday Review, 2 April 1898, pp. 456-457). Although now engulfed in a suburb of the modern city, and sadly dilapidated, its isolated and unsafe location obliged its owner to maintain an establishment within the city walls. In 1903 Harris was captured and held for a time by the notorious brigand, El Raisuli. Not only did it quickly become apparent that a ransom was unlikely, but captive and captor had developed such mutual respect that his early release was assured (W.B. Harris, Morocco That Was, (1921), ed., 2002, pp. 127-134). By this time Harris had also befriended the Alaouite boy Sultan, Moulay Azziz, and it was on a royal visit that he, Cunninghame Graham and Lavery were embarked, when the present picture was painted during the winter and spring of 1906-7 (The inscription, lower right, has customarily been read as ‘3 July’, but this now seems unlikely since Lavery is now known not to have visited Tangier in high summer).
It is not known when Lavery and Harris first met. We can assume that they were well acquainted before the artist’s purchase of his studio-villa at Tangier, and the Fez expedition. Lavery remarks on the abject poverty of the Arab villages they passed through and he was clearly impressed by the writer’s coolness when they were surrounded by ferocious, hungry tribesmen. Harris apparently ‘took out his notebook, wrote something and passed it over’. Lavery continues ‘the chief examined it in a way that showed he had no notion of what was written, kissed the paper, touched his brow, shook hands, and allowed us to proceed’ (J. Lavery, The Life of a Painter, London, 1940, p. 96). Harris had apparently written a note of safe passage for the tribe, through Raisuli’s fiefdom. They were then joined by the notorious Bibi Carleton, who by that stage was running a flour mill at Alcasar and was acting as honorary consul.
At Fez, while Harris paid court to the Sultan, Lavery sought the support of his trusted envoy, General Sir Harry Aubrey de Maclean, in obtaining a view of the harem, the subject of a large canvas, apparently completed in situ (Private Collection) (A more conventional half-length portrait of Harris, painted in Tangier, which passed through the Fine Art Society in the 1990s, is also known). However, the present picture must equally be counted one of the triumphs of the trip. It succinctly expresses what it meant to travel across the desert sands in the Edwardian period. Lavery too would don gaiters, jodhpurs, and a toupee on such occasions; he too would adopt an attitude of ‘derring-do’. Spontaneity and depth of character are complemented by fine judgement in the placing of the figure; harmonies of colour and tone are swiftly observed in Harris’s splendid portrait; and all are marshalled in the expression of one of the most interesting players in British Imperial history.
Lavery revisited Fez in April 1920, and he remained in regular contact with Harris until, having exhausted its motifs, he sought the writer’s assistance to help sell his house in Tangier in 1923.
We are very grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for preparing this catalogue entry.
Walter Burton Harris (1866-1933) was the son of a Quaker shipping insurance broker (J. Chandler, ‘Afterword’ in W.B. Harris, Morocco That Was, (1921), ed., 2002, pp. 233-245). His mother was Scots and independently wealthy, and the family lived on the Chelsea Embankment as neighbours of Whistler and Oscar Wilde, while their son attended Harrow School. He could easily have slipped into the world of youthful aesthetes had he not abandoned his studies at Cambridge University to travel, and at the age of nineteen, discovered Tangier where, on an allowance of £180 a year, he could live comfortably. Within a few years Harris was sending colourful accounts of his travels to English journals along with lengthier pieces on Moroccan politics. The enormous strategic importance of Morocco, and Tangier in particular, meant that it was a hotbed of international intrigue and Harris had his ear to the ground. Such was his depth of understanding of international affairs that he would eventually be appointed Times correspondent (Harris received a full contract from The Times 1906; prior to this he had been given a monthly stipend).
The receipt of a legacy in 1894 enabled him to construct the Villa Harris with its splendid gardens and unruly peacocks, on the route de Malabata, to the east of Medina (W.B Harris, ‘In a Moorish Garden’, The Saturday Review, 2 April 1898, pp. 456-457). Although now engulfed in a suburb of the modern city, and sadly dilapidated, its isolated and unsafe location obliged its owner to maintain an establishment within the city walls. In 1903 Harris was captured and held for a time by the notorious brigand, El Raisuli. Not only did it quickly become apparent that a ransom was unlikely, but captive and captor had developed such mutual respect that his early release was assured (W.B. Harris, Morocco That Was, (1921), ed., 2002, pp. 127-134). By this time Harris had also befriended the Alaouite boy Sultan, Moulay Azziz, and it was on a royal visit that he, Cunninghame Graham and Lavery were embarked, when the present picture was painted during the winter and spring of 1906-7 (The inscription, lower right, has customarily been read as ‘3 July’, but this now seems unlikely since Lavery is now known not to have visited Tangier in high summer).
It is not known when Lavery and Harris first met. We can assume that they were well acquainted before the artist’s purchase of his studio-villa at Tangier, and the Fez expedition. Lavery remarks on the abject poverty of the Arab villages they passed through and he was clearly impressed by the writer’s coolness when they were surrounded by ferocious, hungry tribesmen. Harris apparently ‘took out his notebook, wrote something and passed it over’. Lavery continues ‘the chief examined it in a way that showed he had no notion of what was written, kissed the paper, touched his brow, shook hands, and allowed us to proceed’ (J. Lavery, The Life of a Painter, London, 1940, p. 96). Harris had apparently written a note of safe passage for the tribe, through Raisuli’s fiefdom. They were then joined by the notorious Bibi Carleton, who by that stage was running a flour mill at Alcasar and was acting as honorary consul.
At Fez, while Harris paid court to the Sultan, Lavery sought the support of his trusted envoy, General Sir Harry Aubrey de Maclean, in obtaining a view of the harem, the subject of a large canvas, apparently completed in situ (Private Collection) (A more conventional half-length portrait of Harris, painted in Tangier, which passed through the Fine Art Society in the 1990s, is also known). However, the present picture must equally be counted one of the triumphs of the trip. It succinctly expresses what it meant to travel across the desert sands in the Edwardian period. Lavery too would don gaiters, jodhpurs, and a toupee on such occasions; he too would adopt an attitude of ‘derring-do’. Spontaneity and depth of character are complemented by fine judgement in the placing of the figure; harmonies of colour and tone are swiftly observed in Harris’s splendid portrait; and all are marshalled in the expression of one of the most interesting players in British Imperial history.
Lavery revisited Fez in April 1920, and he remained in regular contact with Harris until, having exhausted its motifs, he sought the writer’s assistance to help sell his house in Tangier in 1923.
We are very grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for preparing this catalogue entry.