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Sir John Lavery RA RSA RHA (1856-1941)
A BACCHANTE, 1910
oil on canvas
signed lower left; signed again, titled [A Bacchante], dated and inscribed with artist’s London address [5 Cromwell] on
reverse
30 x 25in. (76.20 x 63_cm)
Provenance:
The Collection of Mr and Mrs George A. Hearn, New York until 1913;Their sale, American Art Gallery, New York, George A.
Hearn Collection, 25 February to 4 March 1918, catalogue no. 228;To K.W. Kraushaar, New York; J.G. Butler, Butler Institute,
Youngstown, Ohio;Thence by descent;Peter Nahum;To present owner
Exhibited:
Royal Society of Portrait Painters, London, 1910, as Mrs Ralph Peto; Coronation Exhibition, Shepherd’s Bush, London,
1910, as Mrs Ralph Peto; Autumn Exhibition, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 1912, catalogue no. 372; Exhibition of British
Pictures, The Lotus Club, New York
Literature:
‘Exhibition in London: Society of Portrait Painters’, Western Daily Press, 26 September 1910, p. 9;
Walter Shaw Sparrow, John Lavery and his Work, n.d., [1912], (Kegan Paul, Trubner, Trench & Co), p. 191;
Velhagen und Klasing Almanach, 1912;
American Art Annual XV, 1918, p. 311
In 1910 the calls for John Lavery to be elected to the Royal Academy rose to a crescendo in the press. Fêted in Europe
and North America, he had the unique distinction of having two works in the French national collection and his
reputation as a leading portrait painter had grown among the younger layers of the British aristocracy with prominent
sitters including the McLarens, the Windsor-Clives, the Hely-Hutchinsons and others.1 To confirm his pre-eminence that
year, he was chosen to represent Britain with a solo exhibition at the prestigious Venice Biennale and it was at this point,
the striking Ruby Peto came to the studio in Cromwell Place to be
painted (fig 1).
Dressed as a ‘bacchante’, she moved across the field of vision,
looking round to catch the painter’s eye. In her cerise wrapper,
laurel wreath and pale make-up, she trailed memories of Reynolds
and Romney, cherished eighteenth century masters now the
height of fashion with Gilded Age collectors (fig 2). In Lavery’s
terms, as he told Selwyn Brinton, the artist ‘who can depict the
fashion of his day [in such a way] that it shall be of his day, and yet
for all time ... has solved the problem’.2 Like Baudelaire he believed
that catching the complexities of
Large Image & Place Bid Lot 30IMPORTANT IRISH ART · 25 MAY 2015 AT 6PM