The Blacksmiths of Tramore
Sir John Lavery RA RSA RHA (1856–1941)
Oil on canvas
4 x 18 inches; 61 x 45.7 cm
Signed
Private Collection, Ireland
[For commentary and exhibition history, see below]
The Fine Art Society, London, has most generously given its permission to use information, images, and text from its catalogues in the Victorian Web, and this generosity has led to the creation of hundreds and hundreds of the site's most valuable documents on painting, drawing, sculpture, furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, metalwork, and the people who created them. The copyright on text and images from their catalogues remains, of course, with the Fine Art Society. [GPL]
Commentary by Kenneth McConkey
Despite the bitter internecine slayings of the Civil War in the Ireland of the early 1920s, Lavery cherished the idea that he would be able to produce a series of canvases representing aspects of rural life. He and his wife, Hazel, set out from Dublin in the summer of 1924 driving south through Wicklow to the town of Tramore, in Co Waterford where they stopped en route to Kerry. Their final objective was the famous Parknasilla Hotel, but back in Tramore the painter was temporarily detained on a group of canvases of colourful local characters, including a group of stonebreakers working by the wayside, an itinerant musician known as Phil the Fluter, and a group portrait of the O’Sullivan family (McConkey 2010, p.165).
Arguably the most important sketch produced in Tramore was a picture of the local blacksmiths at work in the forge, run by members of the Murray family; In a letter to the author dated October 1997, Mrs Julie Murray explained that the men at work were her husband’s great-grandfather, his grandfather and his grand-uncle. Blacksmiths attained almost symbolic significance in the days of the Empire, with Stanhope Forbes’ Forging the Anchor, 1892 (Ipswich Museums). Lavery’s painting has however, no such overtones and, as an on-the-spot record it more closely replicates the spirit of Whistler’s The Little Forge, Lyme Regis, 1895 (Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow University), demonstrating that the painter of princes and prelates was not averse to working in uncomfortable circumstances.
This picture was chosen from the Tramore group to hang beside Lavery’s ‘portrait interiors’ of the aristocracy in his exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1925. The impressionistic handling of the Murrays, working in unison at the anvil, in the humble surroundings of their workshop confirms Desmond MacCarthy’s observation that the interior was Lavery’s forte, and was ‘one of the most agreeable themes open to a painter of modern life’.]
Note: Contemporary reports of a larger, scaled up version of the present work remain unconfirmed and no such work has ever surfaced.
Exhibited
- London, Leicester Galleries, Portrait Interiors by Sir John Lavery RA, 1925, no.3.
- New York, Duveen Galleries, Portraits, Interiors and Landscapes by Sir John Lavery RA RSA RHA LLD, 1925, no.20.
- Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, An Exhibition of Portraits, Landscapes and Interiors by Sir John Lavery, 1926, no.25.
- London, Colnaghi’s Their Majesties’ Court … Portrait Studies and other Sketches by Sir John Lavery RA, 1932, no.63.
References
Anon. ‘Lavery’, The American Magazine of Art xvii (February 1926): 58.
MacCarthy, Desmond. ‘Sir John Lavery’s Portrait Interiors’, Apollo 2 (1925): 268, 273.
McConkey, Kenneth. John Lavery, A Painter and his World. London: Atelier Books, 2010); 165, 167 (illus. in col).
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. 29.
Victorian
Web
Artists
John
Lavery
Next
Last modified 4 October 2011