A stark new portrait of Erin's allegory

SINCE the new hanging in the National Gallery earlier this year, its Irish rooms have been dominated by one painting. Sir John Lavery's portrait of his wife, Hazel, dwarfs the canvases of the other 20th century painters. Wrapped in a Moorish dress of mourning mauves, purples and black, and framed by the consecutive doorways of the wing, Hazel stares down the central axis of the collection through the Gallery's visitors as if she were presiding over the salon she hosted in her husband's studio in London during the first World War and after.

The idea of occupying such a central place in our National Gallery would have delighted Hazel Lavery, for being at the centre of things, most of all things Irish, was the consuming passion of her life.

Sinead McCoole has written an outstanding first book on an individual who has existed until now in Irish life merely as the allegorical Erin on our currency, or more recently as the translucent face of its watermark. Drawing on archives in Washington D.C., New York, Texas, London, and notably, for the first time, Hazel Lavery's private papers found in an attic in County Meath she has produced something more than an original biography of a society hostess.

Sinead McCoole has provided us with an insight into the world of the subtext to the London treaty negotiations of 1921. She has also provided an insight into the great and the good of British and Irish society at work and play between the wars. `And beyond all of this we are confronted with the first documented political sex scandal in the history of this state.

HAZEL was born in 1880 into the respectable and increasingly wealthy Chicago Martyn family, with a remote Irish ancestry. Educated to succeed in society as a hostess and a wife, her mother's planned progression for her from debutante to respectable socialite was interrupted during a visit in 1903 to Peg Meil in Brittany.

In what was then a thriving artists' colony, Hazel met and became enchanted by John Lavery, a Belfast painter who had already secured a reputation in London. John and Hazel were an incongruous match from the outset. She was intelligent, stunningly beautiful, and a gifted artist in her own right. He was relishing the bohemian life of the artist, travelling between Paris and Brittany with a beautiful German model and another Irish female companion in tow. He was 24 years her senior, short, and so much less than handsome that one mordant observer of London society later referred to the couple as `beauty and the beast".

Mrs Martyn had higher expectations for her eldest daughter. She whisked her back to the US and into a marriage with a more acceptable young New York surgeon and longtime admirer of Hazel's, Ned Trudeau. He died of pneumonia within a year. After a difficult pregnancy, Hazel returned with her mother to France and renewed her acquaintance with John. Once again, the mother stepped in and demanded a six month separation. During this time, Hazel met Len Thomas, an American diplomat in Rome, fell in love and returned to America to marry him. Thomas abandoned her on the eve of their marriage.

However, John Lavery waited for her and for her mother's departure. When Mrs Martyn died in 1909, after depleting much of the family fortune, Hazel moved to England and married John.

With John already established as a portrait artist, Hazel had an entree into the centre of London society. She set about the business of reinventing herself, jettisoning her American baggage and accent and embracing all that was Irish, including a mild brogue. On the eve of the first World War, Hazel had established herself as one of the leading society hostesses in the capital a position of prominence she was to retain over the next two decades. Painters, writers, and the aristocracy gathered at the now revamped Lavery home and John's studio in Kensington, but from the outset, Hazel cultivated a political salon `and made welcome the Churchills, Asquiths, Carsons, and the Londonderrys.

John Lavery, as an official war painter, enjoyed an unspectacular war recording what was then the novelty of a home front. Hazel, increasingly fascinated by Ireland and its gathering political tumult, encouraged John to begin his `Irish Collection", recording the major events and political protagonists after 1915. Redmond and Carson agreed to sit in early 1916, but the Rising altered considerably the subject matter for the collection. Lavery painted Casement in the dock as the death sentence was pronounced and continued to record the events and personalities of the Irish issue during the next five years he even attempted to track down Michael Collins in Ireland during 1920.

BEFORE Michael Collins's arrival in London for the treaty negotiations of late 1921, Hazel had fallen for the myth which preceded him. She wrote to him care of his sister in Kensington, and shortly after, unannounced, he arrived at Lavery's studio for a sitting. Hazel had caught the most sought after subject and society guest in London that autumn. She busily `set about introducing him and the other plenipotentiaries to London society and indeed, in the informal setting of her salon, to the ministers of the British government. Hazel was only too delighted to oil the wheels of diplomacy and place herself at the interface of Anglo Irish politics at their most fraught and telling moment. She was to jealously seek to maintain that momentary position of importance long after the treaty was signed and Irish politics had been domesticated in the new Free State.

Such a connoisseur of raw talent as Collins could not but have been impressed by Hazel's intelligence and ability as social manipulator and he immediately identified her as an ally. Between them there was an affection, probably an attraction, and he made much time for her during her visit with Sir John to Dublin in the week prior to his fatal tour of the south.

That the relationship was consummated is doubtful and even the evidence for the romantic aspect of the alliance is undermined by its basis in hearsay and reliance on Hazel's "copies" of original documents. But there again one would expect Collins to be as circumspect in any London affair he may have had as he was about the London assassination he ordered.

Kevin O'Higgins lacked such solicitousness. The Vice President of the Free State, first Minister of Justice, and strong man of the Cosgrave regime fell hopelessly in love with Hazel and recorded the fact in a substantial and authenticated correspondence.

From the letters Sinead McCoole has quoted, O'Higgins emerges as a sad, despondent man in as extreme a contrast as is imaginable to the public vibrant ideologue of the Free State. In the context of our received history and self perception of who we are as a private and public people, Hazel's relationship with O'Higgins may seem bizarre, even grotesque, given his position, his avowed religious orthodoxy and his recent marriage and growing family even more so when we learn that O'Higgins had intended to install Hazel in the Phoenix Park as Vicereine and Sir John as Viceroy.

IF the reaction to the disclosure that the moral architect of the new State was an adulterer is one of shock, from either professional historians or the general`public, then it is to dismiss the hard learned truth of public life in Ireland during the last decade that our leaders in that historical fantasy land, "holy Ireland", secular and religious, have never been immune to the frailties of the human condition.

In any decade to the present one, that would have come as a profound revelation. In 1996, it comes as a timely historical reminder.

It would be a travesty if O'Higgins's memory, his political achievements and most of all the political creed which he lived and died for were overshadowed by the fact that he had, for whatever reason, an extra marital affair. A prurient interest in the lives of historical figures is undeniable. But in Ireland in.the last decade, and with special reference to Collins and de Valera, it has come to reflect both an historical distraction and immaturity which does not serve us well.

O'Higgins championed the cause of democracy through the bloodiest days of the civil war and ensured it survived the challenges it received within the new State. Beside that achievement, the fact that he was unfaithful to his wife matters as much to the material wellbeing of the State as the question of whether or not Michael Collins died a virgin. Sinead McCoole has given us much more than a biography of a colourful society hostess. Instead, not unlike a restorer of old masters, she has rubbed away at an old accepted picture with which we have lived and, grown comfortable and discovered on the canvass beneath a brilliant trompe l'oeil depicting not alone a new portrait of Hazel, but also a society and its politics in a state of glorious unguarded nakedness.

Hazel A Life of Lady Lavery 1880-1935 by Sinead McCoole The Lilliput Press will be published on 18th September