IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART 28 September 2026

30 19 Sir John Lavery RA RSA RHA (1856-1941) THE POND AT THE GLEN, PAISLEY, 1886 oil on canvas signed and dated lower right; titled and inscribed on Ewan Mundy Fine Art label on reverse 10 by 12in. (25.4 by 30.5cm) Frame Size: 18.5 by 20.5in. (47 by 52.1cm) Provenance: The Curley Family, 1886-c.1985; Ewan Mundy Fine Art, Glasgow, 1985; Private collection Exhibited: ‘Portraits, Pictures and Sketches painted in the Neighbourhood’, Clark Hall, Paisley, November 1886; ’Lavery and Osborne, Observing Life’, Hunt Museum, Limerick, 2019, unnumbered, p.18, illustrated p.19 As a symphonist creates harmony from individual notes, Lavery painting here en plein air, composes chords of colour. Through complex spatial layering; the pale pink of rowing punt end-deck, as it floats tranquilly in the late afternoon sun, reflected effortlessly at foreshore, while pastoral greens, shadowed light to dark, lead the eye to castellated turret beyond. The carefully placed and freely observed lady with parasol assists in allowing this spatial transition it’s natural flow. Compositionally without flaw, this important work was exhibited in Lavery’s first one-man exhibition in 1886, when the artist was thirty years old - two years after his visits to Grez-sur-Loing, and two years before his pivotal commission to paint the State Visit of Queen Victoria to Glasgow - marking the mid-point of the most important decade in the artist’s life. Lavery displays with great bravura in this sophisticated composition that he has absorbed both the ideas of Impressionism and the Naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884). Going beyond the even tonality and subdued palette popularised throughout Europe by Bastien-Lepage he thus initiates his own style, launching his career as both society painter and artist of distinction. €30,000-€50,000 (£25,640-£42,740 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot19