After visiting the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, a somewhat exasperated Henry James wrote: ‘It may be a narrow point of view, but… it seems to me that a picture should have some relation to life as well as to painting’: a critique aimed specifically at J.M. Whistler, whose work would soon provoke Ruskin’s ‘pot of paint’ imbroglio. Ironically, even if Whistler’s paintings actually bore ‘no relation whatever to life,’ his commitment to art for its own sake was the cornerstone of the Aesthetic Movement, without which much of James’s own work might not have been possible, or at least appreciated.

Undeniably, Whistler edited reality to suit his goals, but his tonal harmonies made a strong case against sentiment and didacticism and encouraged Victorian painters to find new techniques and use ‘real’ people to illustrate them. When Stanhope Forbes’s frustration with the insularity of British art met the singular light and atmosphere of Newlyn, he produced complex tonal works that reasserted working people as a subject worthy of ‘high art’ and caught a contemporary reality that had existed long before artists ‘discovered’ Cornwall or saw Impressionist pictures in London. Its essential regionalism aside, Forbes’s work would not have been out of place in the galleries of the Third Republic. But by the time he painted The Slipway, Impressionism (never a particularly stratified movement) had branched off from a single recognised style to various interrelated approaches to form, colour and handling, many of which were adopted by British artists.

In several of his more celebrated pictures, Philip Wilson Steer used pointillist brushwork and idiosyncratic compositions to imbue otherwise predictable subjects with something enigmatic. In Girl in a Large Hat, his use of limited colour, wet-in-wet handling and tight, cropped framing leave nothing between viewer and subject, and yet suggest that his coster girl might exist somewhere apart from her working life. Likewise, H.H. La Thangue’s square brushwork, high-key palette and selective focus capture actions and atmospheres so immediate, his paintings almost suggest film stills. When Tucking the Rick was exhibited at the Royal Academy, The Spectator praised the interplay of light, shade, colour and texture that made his figures graceful and true ‘without any loss of power.’

Throughout the turn of the century, similar, if arguably less innovative, ‘cakes-and-ale’ subjects were hung alongside interior studies, and people in rooms (or rooms with people, depending on the focus) became a favourite vehicle for showcasing command of light, form and space. In Harold Knight’s conversation piece, Afternoon Tea, he avoided stage-managed narrative in favour of contrasting his models’ calm poise with an array of sparkling surface details that draw

the eye and enliven his confined setting. Similarly, Sir Alfred Munnings turned fugitive light and form to his advantage in a study of his wife Florence, silhouetted wraith-like against a network of pattern that appears to enfold her as if she were seated in a lamp-lit, wallpapered room instead of a shady lane at sunset.

By rejecting static, defined forms and set narratives artists could offer reality and perception as two halves of a process, and paint pictures that communicate simultaneously ‘what is’ and ‘what is suggested’; the Scottish Colourists were particularly effective in this respect. Not only did all four painters spend considerable time in France absorbing the lessons of Post-Impressionism, but John Duncan Fergusson used plein-air painting to capture scenes of city life that often have less to do with a specific place than its effect on human activity. Following Cézanne’s example, Fergusson, John MacLaughlan Milne and Leslie Hunter used strong colour and the nature of oil paint to manipulate surfaces and break up forms, scattering them across boulevards and table tops and leaving them open to perceptions of space and the passing of time. This paradox between focus and obscurity also underscores the vitality of Sir John Lavery’s portrait of his granddaughter Diana Dickinson and Dod Proctor’s sensual study of a young Newlyn woman that portrays not only a nude, but also a state of being.

These paintings illustrate a variety of styles, techniques and approaches to subject matter that defy any blanket term, but each artist was connected to how Impressionism developed or evolved in Britain. Hopefully, I have avoided pushing them into stylistic moulds based on French examples, if only because this would be largely anachronistic and not a little crass. (And I remembered an aphorism about pinning aesthetics on artists being a bit like teaching birds ornithology.) Moreover, as mentioned, Impressionism has no clear taxonomy, and while it lasted far longer in Britain than in France, after WWI it too changed irreversibly. More artists turned to communicating universal reactions, rather than individual sensibilities, and increasingly used expanded compositions, abstract forms or flattened picture planes, all of which demand some level of containment. Artists who still painted en plein air in pursuit of immediate effects of perception (like Steer, who Walter Sickert scathingly called a “gentlemen Impressionist”) tended to remain in England, outside the anxious creative energies of post-war Europe. Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that nearly all of these artists were members of the New English Art Club – which based on the cross-cultural exchange artists and dealers enjoyed in the late nineteenth century – was almost called the Anglo-French Art Club.

Andrea GatesDirector

Foreword

Harold Knight RA ROI RP RWA, 1874–1961

5. Afternoon Tea, 1909oil on canvas 193 x 152 cms 76 x 597⁄8 inssigned verso

Provenance

with David Messum Fine Art, London.Private collection, London.

exhibited

Glasgow: Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, 1909.London: Royal Academy, 1910, no. 761.Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery, 1910.

Literature

‘The Royal Academy Exhibition,’ The Studio 50, no. 207 (June 1910): 20.‘Liverpool Autumn Exhibition,’ The Manchester Guardian, 17 Sept. 1910, 6.L. Wortley, British Impressionism: A Garden of Bright Images (London: Studio Fine Art Publications, 1988), 274.C. Fox, Painting in Newlyn 1900-1930 (Penzance: Orion, 1985), 118.

In the resulting print the seventy-eight-year-old artist stands facing the camera, brushes in hand, his hair newly dyed, and wearing the white dentist’s frock-coat he used in the studio to protect his clothes. The picture behind him was shortly to be dispatched to the Royal Academy summer exhibition – at that point one of the principal events of the London Season. To have one’s portrait displayed at such an event, effectively launched a young person into society – and, following the deaths of Sargent in 1925 and Orpen in 1931, Lavery remained as one of the last fashionable social recorders in paint. Not only did he portray the crowds at Henley and Ascot, but more significantly, at the behest of Lord Duveen, he painted Their Majesties’ Court, Buckingham Palace, 1931 (unlocated), a canvas showing the annual presentation of debutantes.30 Footage of the event preserved by Pathé and contemporary photographs reveal that, as always, the painter’s record was faithful. Members of the audience were picked out individually and rapidly sketched, before inclusion – a practice he had adopted over forty years earlier when entrusted with the equally daunting task of commemorating The State Visit of Queen Victoria to the International Exhibition, Glasgow, 1888 (Glasgow Museums).31 But on this more joyous occasion he was faced with the bevy of attractive young socialites, one of whom was Duveen’s daughter, Dorothy Rose (known as Dolly). All were entering ‘society’ and the annual ‘season’ of balls and sporting events was about to commence. Lavery had, in previous years,

Sir John Lavery RA RSA RHA, 1856–1941

11. Miss Diana Dickinson, 1934oil on canvas156 x 121 cms 613⁄8 x 475⁄8 ins signed lower right

Provenance By descent; 29

with Julian Simon, n.d.; Private collection, UK.

exhibited: London: Royal Academy, 1934, no. 179.Edinburgh: Royal Scottish Academy, 1935, no. 212.Dundee: Victoria Art Galleries, Paintings by Sir John Lavery, Kt, RA, RSA, 1936, no. 20 (as Miss Diana Dickenson).Glasgow: Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, 1939, no. 469.Bolton: Bolton Art Gallery, (?)

Literature:‘The Royal Academy,’ The Times, 9 May 1934, 17.‘Scots Artists to the Fore,’ Aberdeen Journal, 5 May 1934, 7.K. McConkey, Sir John Lavery RA (Belfast: Ulster Museum and the Fine Art Society, 1984), 104-5.K. McConkey, John Lavery, A Painter and his World (Edinburgh: Atelier Books, 2010), 190-2.

Having completed his portrait of Miss Diana Dickinson, Sir John Lavery posed in front of it for a photographer (fig 1).

Fig 1 Sir John Lavery with the completed portrait of Miss Diana Dickinson, 1934

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