ADAM'S - Important Irish Art Auction - 31st May 2017 (Click Lot title for more images and to Place Bid)

Oil on canvas, 36 x 63.5cm (14¼ x 25’’)

Signed, inscribed with title and dated 1911 verso

Provenance: C.W. Kraushaar, by whom donated to the Toledo Museum of Art; their sale Sothebys, 16th May 2008,

where purchased by current owner.

Literature: ‘The Toledo Museum of Art: European Paintings’, 1976, plate 341, illustrated page 92.

From the 1830s North Africa and the Middle East became places of artistic pilgrimage, but while painters such

as Lewis, Lear and Holman Hunt preferred the eastern Mediterranean, in Lavery’s era an instant Orient was to

be found by simply crossing the Straits of Gibraltar. Where Orientalist painters concentrated upon narrating the

Eastern way of life, the rituals of the Mosque and the Harem, Lavery’s generation looked to this environment for its

colour.

Lavery’s first visit to Morocco took place in 1891, at the instigation of his friends, the Glasgow artists Arthur Melville

and Joseph Crawhall. After almost annual visits, in 1903 he bought Dar-el-Midfah (‘the House of the Cannon’, for

a half buried cannon in the garden), a small house in the hills outside Tangier which he continued to visit with his

family over the next 20 years. It has been claimed that for Lavery the strong light, cloudless sky, white walls and

bright colour of Arab dress helped to cleanse his eye after sustained periods of studio portraiture. Within a few

years of visiting Morocco for the first time, the light sable sketching of his Glasgow period gave way to a richer and

more sensuous application.

Lavery exhibited

“Tetuan, Moonrise

” in The Leicester Galleries exhibition “

Cabinet Pictures by Sir John Lavery

” in

1904, Cat. No. 38, so is likely to have travelled there in 1903/1904. Again, in the spring of 1906, Lavery took an

overland expedition to Fez together with Walter Harris and Cunninghame Graham and travelled along the coast

to Tetuan before travelling inland to Fez. Lavery undertook several studies of the market place at Tetuan, the

camp outside the city walls and this nocturne painted on the outskirts of the town. Although dated 1911, Kenneth

McConkey suggests he is unlikely to have visited Tetuan in that year due to the rising tensions in Morocco (even on

their 1906 visit they were accompanied by 13 armed guards) and so it is likely that Lavery painted this based on the

sketch exhibited in 1904, or another sketch from his trip in 1906, and just finished this work in 1911. Lavery execut-

ed quite a number of nocturne views during his time in Tangiers.

Kenneth McConkey has described this work “On one of these occasions the Port clothed in Moonlight, took on an

air of mystery which appealed to Lavery’s acute sensitivity to colour and tone”

We are grateful to Prof. Kenneth McConkey whose many writings on Sir John Lavery formed the basis of the cata-

logue entry.

€ 10,000 - 15,000