John Lavery: the Belfast orphan who painted the Treaty

For most of the twentieth century, Irish money carried the face of a painter's wife. She was Hazel Lavery, born in Chicago; the painter was her husband, Sir John Lavery, born at 47 North Queen Street in north Belfast, where his father kept a wine and spirit business. He was orphaned before he was four.

Belfast, and then nothing

Lavery was born on 20 March 1856 and baptised at St Patrick's six days later. He preferred to tell people he was born on St Patrick's Day — in his autobiography he explained that he chose the date “to save explanations when asked”. It is a small thing, but it tells you something about a man who spent his life managing how he was seen.

In April 1859 his father Henry sailed for New York aboard the packet ship Pomona. The ship went down off the Wexford coast and Henry Lavery drowned. His mother died shortly afterwards. John, aged three, was passed to relatives on a farm near Moira, Co. Down, and then on again — to a sister, to Ayrshire, and eventually to Glasgow, where he arrived as a boy and stayed.

He learned his trade retouching photographic negatives for a Glasgow photographer and took evening classes at the Haldane Academy. In 1878 he set up his own studio. In 1879 it burned down. The three hundred pounds of insurance money paid for a winter at Heatherley's in London, and then for Paris: the Académie Julian under Bouguereau, evening classes at Colarossi's, and — the part that actually mattered — the summers of 1883 and 1884 at Grez-sur-Loing, painting outdoors in the manner of Bastien-Lepage. The National Gallery of Ireland holds three pictures from those two summers.

A Grey Summer's Day, Grez is the Lavery of that moment: no anecdote, no flourish, just wet light on a river.

Two hundred and fifty-three faces

Back in Glasgow from 1885, he became one of the Glasgow Boys, applying French plein-air method to Scottish middle-class leisure — tennis parties, garden afternoons, the Dutch Cocoa House at the 1888 International Exhibition.

That exhibition made him. He was commissioned to paint Queen Victoria's state visit to it, and delivered a canvas over four metres wide containing 253 individual portraits, worked up largely from photographs over roughly two years. It hangs in Kelvingrove today. After it, he was a portrait painter with a diary.

He left for London in 1896, saying he had outgrown Glasgow. In 1898 he helped Whistler found the International Society, and in 1903 he was a pall-bearer at Whistler's funeral.

Kathleen, and then Hazel

He married Kathleen MacDermott in 1889. She died of tuberculosis in 1891, shortly after their daughter Eileen was born. Eileen appears in his work for years afterwards — most tenderly in the two communion pictures now in Dublin and Belfast.

In 1909 he married Hazel Martyn, an American of Irish descent, born in Chicago in 1880 and twenty-four years his junior. She had trained as a painter herself and largely stopped after the marriage. She sat for him for twenty-six years, more often than any other sitter he ever had.

The Green Sofa, from around 1903, belongs to the years between the two marriages — a Whistlerian study of his German model Mary Auras, and one of the quietest things he made.

Tangier

He first went to Morocco in 1890 and in 1903 bought a house on the hillside outside Tangier, Dar-el-Midfah, where he wintered for years. The North African pictures are the ones where his handling loosens completely: Evening, Tangier is barely more than a few decisions about light.

The war he was not allowed to see

Lavery was appointed an official war artist in 1917, attached to the Royal Navy. He never reached the Western Front — ill health, and then a serious car crash during a Zeppelin raid over London. So he painted the home front instead: Scapa Flow, the Firth of Forth, shipyards, airfields, munitions works.

He did get airborne. In August 1918 he flew three times from East Fortune aboard the airship NS.7, and appears on the official crew lists for 26, 27 and 29 August. A Convoy, North Sea came out of those flights. He was knighted on 6 February 1918.

Cromwell Place, 1921

The Anglo-Irish Treaty was negotiated at Downing Street and in the Irish delegation's houses at Hans Place and Cadogan Gardens. It was not negotiated at the Laverys' — but their London house at 5 Cromwell Place was offered as neutral ground, and the suppers held there let the two sides talk privately in a way the formal sessions did not allow.

Lavery painted fourteen of the negotiators. Lloyd George claimed to be too busy to sit. Michael Collins is said to have posed as briefly as he could manage, in his overcoat, with a gun in his pocket. His Ratification of the Irish Treaty in the English House of Lords is in the National Gallery of Ireland.

The following August, Collins was killed at Béal na mBláth. Lavery painted him lying in state in the mortuary chapel of St Vincent's Hospital. “He might have been Napoleon in marble as he lay in his uniform, covered by the Free State flag, with a crucifix on his breast,” he wrote. The picture is Michael Collins (Love of Ireland), and it is in the Hugh Lane.

The face on the money

The story is usually told as though Lavery simply put his wife on the banknotes. What happened is stranger and better. The Currency Commission of the Irish Free State, advised by a committee, decided the new notes should carry an emblematic female figure. Lavery was then commissioned, and he reworked a portrait of Hazel he had painted in 1909 into Kathleen Ni Houlihan, set against the Lakes of Killarney.

The Series A notes were first issued on 10 September 1928. The last of them were issued between March 1976 and April 1977, and the £100 stayed current until 1996. After the design changed, Hazel's head survived as the watermark on the notes that followed — so her face was on Irish money, in one form or another, from 1928 until the euro arrived in 2002.

Giving it back

In 1929 Lavery gave thirty-four paintings to the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery, the institution that became the Ulster Museum. He gave two reasons: “one that I was born in Belfast, and the other that they had built a gallery there, but had no pictures to put in it.” After Hazel died in January 1935, the Treaty portraits and Love of Ireland went to the Hugh Lane as the Lady Lavery Memorial Bequest.

He published his autobiography, The Life of a Painter, in 1940, came home to Ireland at the outbreak of the Second World War, and died on 10 January 1941 at Rossenarra House, Kilmoganny, Co. Kilkenny, aged eighty-four. He is buried at Putney Vale in London.

Where to see him

The National Gallery of Ireland holds eighteen Laverys, including the Grez pictures and the Kathleen Ni Houlihan. The Hugh Lane has the Collins pictures. The Ulster Museum has the 1929 gift. Kelvingrove has the Queen Victoria canvas, and Tate has The Jockeys' Dressing Room at Ascot.

If you want him on your own wall, the John Lavery collection runs from the Grez summers through Tangier to the Treaty room, framed or unframed. There is a fuller guide to his life, his places and his best-known works on the John Lavery artist page. Every print is open edition, made to order and shipped worldwide, so there is no reason to hurry.