24
WHYTES
SINCE 1783
,
34
Sir John Lavery RA RSA RHA (1856-1941)
A STREET IN TANGIER
oil on board
signed lower left; inscribed “A Street in Tangier / by John
Lavery / 5 Cromwell Pl / London”; also with typed Pyms Gallery,
London label on reverse
10 by 14in. (25 by 36cm)
Provenance:
With Pyms Gallery, London, c.1990;
Their sale, 1992;
Sotheby’s, 13 May 2005, lot 60;
Private collection
Exhibited:
‘Cabinet Pictures by John Lavery’, Leicester Galleries, London,
1904 , no. 7 (?) as
Tangier, A Street
;
‘A Free Spirit, Irish Art 1860-1960’, Royal Hibernian Academy,
Dublin, 1990
Literature:
Kenneth McConkey, ‘The White City - Sir John Lavery in
Tangier’,
GPA Irish Arts Review
, 1989, p. 62 (illustrated);
Kenneth McConkey,
A Free Spirit, Irish Art 1860-1960
, 1990
(Antique Collectors Club in association with Pyms Gallery,
London), p.101 (illustrated)
The ‘chief note’ of Tangier was ‘whiteness’ according to RB
Cunninghame Graham. In an essay on artists’ haunts in 1909 he
described a city that throughout the nineteenth century had provided
writers and painters with an instant authentic experience of Muslim
culture.
1
A short sea crossing from the southernmost tip of Europe, its
souks
,
mosques, and moonlit rooftop music and dancing formed an
essential part of the texture of western European Orientalism.
Graham’s observations are confirmed by the series of small luminous
oil sketches recently produced by his close friend, John Lavery, and
reproduced to illustrate the article.
2
It took a painter to tell him what
he was seeing and on several occasions he pays tribute to the artist –
theirs was a lifelong friendship. Lavery had known the ‘adventurer-
laird of Gartmore’ for at least eighteen
years and recently, in company with
The Times
correspondent,Walter
Harris, they had ridden across the
desert together to visit the Sultan’s
court at Fez.
3
But it was the ‘white houses, sands
like snow, and, above all … dazzling
white atmosphere’ of the old coastal
city overlooking the Straits of
Gibraltar that enchanted them. In the
maze of the Kasbah
,
‘the Arabs flitted
to and fro, silent as shadows … they
seemed like a population of
uncloistered friars’, said Graham in his
introduction to the catalogue of
Lavery’s exhibition in 1904.
4
He could
easily have been looking at the
present picture. Under a vivid cobalt canopy the whitewashed houses
glowed in the sunlight, and sharp shadows cut rectangles of pale blue,
violet and ochre – their irregular shapes, performing an abstract
theatre, that momentarily disorientated the western eye.
Lavery first confronted this marquetry of intersecting planes in 1891 in
a small study painted from the rooftop of the Hotel Continental (fig 1),
but it was only on subsequent visits that the secrets of narrow
alleyways revealed themselves in the furtive glance from a doorway in
the infamous Rue des Femmes, or the bustle of figures retreating up
the hill from the souk at the call to prayer.
This was the essential appeal of a setting vividly described by the Irish
painter, Norman Garstin, when in 1897 he wrote to fellow artists,
… that wall in front of you is homely whitewash, and steeped for a
moment in a violet shade; a door opens and a rectangular slab of
yellow white light from the opposite wall of the patio makes you
blink and deepens the violet of the near wall; purple patches of
shade stain the patio’s red tiles with silhouetted pictures of fig
leaves …
5
This was Lavery’s quest in small studies that, like the present example,
were painted not as preparations for larger works, but as ends in
themselves.They were vivid snapshots of familiar corners that he
would give to painter-friends like Alfred East – and others like
Cunninghame Graham.
6
Such pictures are difficult to date precisely,
although it is likely that
A Street in Tangier,
precedes the trip to Fez in
1906. Its specific location and the vantage point from which it was
painted remain to be determined – although it is likely to show the
winding street that leads up into the Kasbah.
Throughout the years 1891-1920, when he visited Morocco regularly,
Welsh, Scots, English, Canadian and French artists - Frank Brangwyn,
Arthur Melville, Alfred East, James Wilson Morrice and Henri Matisse –
all felt the rejuvenating effect of the ‘white atmosphere’ of Tangier, but
it was Lavery, in small stunning pictures of the streets of the old city
who definitively caught it.
Prof. Kenneth McConkey
April 2014
€
20,000-
€
30,000 (£16,530-£24,790 approx.)
I
Fig 1
Tangier from the Hotel
Continental,
1891 (45.5 by 35.5cm),
Private Collection
1
RB Cunninghame Graham, ‘The Atmosphere of Morocco’, in Alfred East introd.,
Sketching Grounds,
1909 (Studio Special Number), p.145.
2
The two had probably met on Lavery’s first visit to the city in 1891, when
according to Graham, he rode swiftly to the rescue after the painter’s horse
had bolted. In Lavery’s account, he helped to rescue Graham from a group of
belligerent Moors when he was haranguing them on his favourite topics –
Free Speech and Democracy – neither of which they could remotely
comprehend; see Walter Shaw Sparrow,
John Lavery and his Work,
n.d. [1912],
(Kegan Paul,Trubner,Trench and Co), p.84.
3
Kenneth McConkey,
John Lavery, A Painter and his World
, 2010 (Atelier Books),
pp. 96-7.
4
RB Cunninghame Graham, ‘Introduction?’,
Cabinet Pictures by John Lavery,
1904 (Exhibition catalogue, Leicester Galleries, London), p.7
5
Norman Garstin, ‘Tangier as a Sketching Ground’,
The Studio,
vol 11, 1897, p.
178.
6
East, a student friend from the Haldane Academy in Glasgow, owned several
small Moroccan street scenes.
