WHYTE'S IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART MONDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2022

28 18 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. (76.2 by 63.5cm) Frame Dimensions: 36.5 by 31.5in. (92.7 by 80cm) 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; Whyte’s, 30 September 2013, lot 33; 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. 2Back 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 fromYork.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, (Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane.) 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). Prof. Kenneth McConkey Fig 1 Brown Furs (Dame en Noir) c. 1906, Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane Footnotes: 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 SecondWorldWar 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. €40,000-€60,000 (£34,480-£51,720 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot18