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Sir John Lavery RA RSA RHA (1856-1941)
THE LADY PARMOOR, 1919
oil on canvas
signed lower right; signed, titled and dated on reverse
30 by 25in. (76.20 by 63.50cm)
Provenance:
Lord and Lady Parmoor by descent;
1
Adam’s, 11 December 1990, lot 73;
where purchased and by descent to the previous owners;
Adam’s, 6 December 2010, lot 97;
Private collection
Exhibited:
Royal Academy, London, 1920, catalogue no. 159
With the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front in November
1918, Lavery was much in demand. Not yet released from his
commission as an Official War Artist, he had a large commemorative oil
painting depicting the surrender of the German Navy to complete. He
was also given the additional task to tour supply depots and hospitals
in Northern France before they were dismantled and record women’s
work behind the lines.While his diary quickly filled with portrait
commissions, normal everyday life in the busy studio in Cromwell Place,
South Kensington, did not resume until after his holiday in February
1919 at Baron d’Erlanger’s villa at Sidi-bu-Said on the bay of Tunis.
2
Back for the start of the London Season, sittings began with feverish
intensity and within the year he completed portraits of Duff Cooper,
Lady Diana Manners, Flora Lion (sold in these rooms, 19 February 2007,
lot 93 for
€
24,000), Lord Londonderry, the aviator, Sir John Alcock, and
other prominent society figures. Among these was Marion Emily Ellis,
who in July of that year became the second Baroness Parmoor.The
portrait may indeed have been painted as a wedding gift from Charles
Cripps, 1st Baron Parmoor, to his bride.
3
Cripps and his new wife were
both staunch anti-war Liberals, Marion’s radicalism being deeply
ingrained by family tradition.
4
Her mother, Maria Rowntree, was one of
the eminent Quaker philanthropist dynasty that hailed from York.
5
No social butterfly, she had been an implacable campaigner against
conscription, narrowly escaping imprisonment for her convictions.
During the twenties she and her husband veered increasingly towards
the Labour Party, he becoming Leader of the House of Lords and a
supporter of Ramsay MacDonald.
It was this formidable personality who sat for the painter in 1919 and
no doubt they discussed his recent exploits as a war artist, flying over
the North Sea convoys in airships on the look-out for enemy men-of-
war. Lavery too had pacifist sympathies, but his task at this point was to
find an arrangement of colour and form that matched his subject and
the scheme he adopted in
The Lady Parmoor
was a familiar one. His
favoured 30 by 25in. canvases were ideally suited to half-lengths and
the sitter, dressed in dark blue-grey and black, relieved with a fur stoll
provided an ideal ‘harmony in brown’. It was a variation on a sequence
which began in 1894 with the portrait of Esther McLaren, exhibited at
the Royal Academy as
Lady in Brown.
It was memorably revisited with
his first portrait of Hazel Trudeau, as
Brown Furs (Dame en Noir)
c. 1906,
(fig 1.) and in the years which followed, reworked it in early portraits of
Lady Diana Manners and Lady Gwendoline Churchill (both c.1913,
private collections).
6
Fine furs, Lavery felt, tended to flatter a sitter and in the present
example they lead the eye to one of his most serious female subjects.
At this point Marian Cripps had taken up the causes of reconciliation
and fighting famine in war-torn Europe and post-revolutionary Russia.
She would go on to lead the World YWCA and the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom, and in her seventies, at
the end of a very active career, she spoke out against the use of nuclear
weapons.
For Lavery, the drama he sought for
The Lady Parmoor
contained
distinct echoes of the past and intimations of the future. Its Old Master
tonalities took him back to his days as a copyist in the Prado, while they
anticipate the haunting cadences of his second half-length treatment
of Gwendoline Churchill in 1920 and the visual
éclat
of
The Gold
Turban,
1928 (both Private Collections).
7
Prof. Kenneth McConkey
September 2013
1
It has not been possible to determine precisely when the present picture left
the Cripps family. A number of dispersals of land and chattels took place during
and after the Second World War from the family estate at Parmoor House,
Buckinghamshire.
2
Kenneth McConkey,
John Lavery, A Painter and his World,
2010, (Edinburgh,
Atelier Books), pp. 143-5.
3
Parmoor’s first wife,Theresa Potter, sister of the Fabian, Beatrice Webb, died in
1893. Marian Ellis was forty-one at the time of their marriage on 14 July 1919. By
that year, Lavery had painted the portrait of
Violet Mary Nelson,
(Private
Collection), the future wife of Parmoor’s son, Frederick Heyworth Cripps, by his
first marriage.
4
Marion’s twin sister, Edith, who shared her views, was in fact imprisoned in 1918.
5
The Rowntree family philanthropy was a direct result of her uncle, Joseph
Rowntree’s encounter at the age of fourteen with victims of the Irish Famine.
6
McConkey, 2010, pp. 108-9.
7
McConkey, 2010, p. 179.
€
30,000-
€
50,000 (£25,640-£42,740 approx.)
WHYTES
SINCE 1783
,
Fig 1
Brown Furs (Dame en Noir)
c. 1906,
Dublin City Gallery,The Hugh Lane
