El Embiste

Sir John Lavery RA RSA RHA (1856–1941)

Oil on canvas

8½ x 5 inches; 22 x 13 cm

Signed and dated '92

Provenance: The Drambuie Collection; their sale Edinburgh, 26 January 2006; Private Collection, Scotland

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Commentary by Kenneth McConkey

Lavery’s travelling companion on his return from Tangier, overland through Spain in 1892 was Alexander Mann, who noted in letters dated 21 April, 24 April and 1 May 1892 that the painter was attending bullfights, even though suffering from a heavy cold.1 According to a etter from Alexander Mann, dated 9 May 1892, when both artists were in Madrid, Lavery, immune for the moment to the real horror of what he saw, went once again to sketch a bullfight. His curiosity for this spectacle was undoubtedly aroused by Joseph Crawhall, his close friend whose first bullfight scenes painted at Algeciras, were shown at the Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolours exhibition in Glasgow in 1889. This curiosity led to a series of small sketches which coincidentally echo the bullfight studies of the Catalan painter, Rámon Casas. Lavery responded to the bold colour and abstract beauty of the setting. In later years he confessed to Walter Shaw Sparrow:

a curious thing happens when an artist sits down before his subject; material things vanish, only colour and its plots remain, and they look visionary. I have never seen a bullfight, though I have been present at twelve in Madrid and Seville. I don’t think I could watch a bullfight, as I am very fond of horses; it is the moving colour that attracts me at this cruel sport. [Sparrow, 98]

Four small studies of bullfights are known, all characterized by powerful contrasts of light and shade, and by vivid. Where the watercolours of Arthur Melville and Joseph Crawhall are carefully planned, Lavery’s control and concentration enables the whole picture to be executed in one sitting

[I am grateful to Martin Hopkinson for the references to Mann's letters mentioned above. KM]

References

McConkey, Kenneth. Lavery and the Glasgow Boys. Exhibition Catalogue. Clandeboye, County Down: The Ava Gallery; Edinburgh: Bourne Fine Art; London: The Fine Art Society, 2010. No. 14.

Sparrow, Walter Shaw. John Lavery and his Work. London: Kegan Paul, Trubner, Trench and Co, n.d [1912].

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Last modified 4 October 2011