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30 16 Sir John Lavery RA RSA RHA (1856-1941) THE TURQUOISE SEA, MIMIZAN, 1917 oil on canvas signed lower left; signed, titled, dated and with Fine Art Society [London] label on reverse 25 by 30in. (63.5 by 76.2cm) Frame Size: 32 by 37.25in. (81.3 by 94.6cm) Provenance: WilliamMarchant & Co., Goupil Gallery, Regent Street, London; Fine Art Society, by September 1980 (stock no 8845); Private collection; Phillip’s, 17 November 1992, lot 16; Private collection Exhibited: ‘Works by John Lavery and Emile Claus’, Goupil Gallery, London, June 1917 Literature: Kenneth McConkey, John Lavery, A Painter and his World, 2010 (Atelier Books), p. 133, 233 (note 108) In January 1917 the Laverys made their first channel crossing in three years. Since the commencement of hostilities in Europe, annual winter visits to their house in Tangier were out of the question. U-boat activity persisted, but it was a risk they were prepared to take when invited to stay at The Woolsack, the Duke of Westminster’s shooting lodge at Mimizan in the Landes. In a letter to Eileen, the painter’s daughter, he provides a description, of the crossing and the ‘feeling of uncertainty about submarines, mines and the effect of icy water’ followed by two depressing days in Paris - ‘what a Paris! … shutters up, miserable people … everyone looked sad …’, - before they caught the sleeper to Bordeaux, where a car met them at the station.1 The lodge, with its glowing log fires, was a haven and during their stay, other house guests including army officers on brief absences from the Front, came and went. 2 Lavery was initially frustrated to discover that priority given to ‘war materials’meant that his painting kit had not been shipped from London and the resourceful artist made his own easel, while a box to contain standard-sized ‘Blanchet’ canvases, acquired in Bordeaux, was made for him by a local carpenter.3 One of these canvases is the present work. Since 1914, Lavery had been unable to paint seascapes, and on this occasion, he was keen to re-engage with his favourite subject. A day or two before Mardi Gras, at the end of February, when the weather had improved, a party from the lodge headed to the coast, five miles away, where the artist found the sea ‘wonderful’, adding that ‘for my part I could go on painting here for the rest of the warm weather’. 4 He would, he wrote, have rented an empty chalet on Mimizan plage, had the creature-comforts of the Duke’s residence not appealed so much to his wife, Hazel. The brief encounter with the Atlantic breakers was nevertheless significant. The young Lord Dalkeith, an adjutant at GHQ, was thrown from his horse into the ‘rollers’ when they were there, but it did not detain the painter. The Côte d’Émeraude demanded a different palette from that of Tangier or the Côte d’Azur. He had painted ‘turquoise’ seas before, but here he was denied distant promontories, rock outcrops and the constant two-way marine traffic that the Straits attracted.5 The sky was covered with thin cloud on this winter day on the Atlantic coast and the retreating breakers converted the ochre sands to greenish umber. From the high dunes, he could record the subtle transitions that took the incoming tide from turquoise back to pale emerald - colour and tone transitions you would not find when looking out to sea from the bay at Tangier.6 Visually, it was the much- needed fillip he required. There was time for only one other known canvas, The Lake, Mimizan, before they were due to leave The Woolsack - a simple composition that Winston Churchill would adopt when he visited the lodge in the spring of 1920. 7 Such was his zeal to continue producing seascapes that the Laverys left Mimizan and travelled south to St Jean de Luz at the beginning of March, where Lavery filled his box with new canvases showing the movement of cargo vessels in the bay.8 One could say that he was preparing himself for months ahead when, as an Official War Artist, he would be assigned to the Admiralty. Yet there was something more fundamental in this Mimizan moment when he re-engaged with the sea. It lay in the primordial nature of his subject - an elusive, ever-changing motif that had fascinated romantics and realists before him - Turner, Courbet, Whistler, Monet ... Kenneth McConkey €60,000-€80,000 (£50,420-£67,230 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot16 Fig 1 John Lavery, The Turquoise Sea, Mimizan, 1917, the present work Fig 2 John Lavery, The Turquoise Sea No. 1, c. 1912, 63.5 x 76.8, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Fig 3 John Lavery, The Lake, Mimizan, 1917, 63.5 x 75 cm, Private Collection