A passion for the political

An exhibition that marries John Lavery's art and his political leanings sets out to challenge what we think being Irish really involves, writes AIDAN DUNNE

NOTHING ILLUSTRATES John Lavery's remarkable involvement with Ireland and Anglo-Irish relations more clearly than his decision, in 1916, to attend and record, on a huge canvas, Roger Casement's appeal against his death sentence. The painting is included in Sinéad McCoole's fascinating exhibition, Passion and Politics, at the Hugh Lane Gallery.

In the show McCoole, the author of a biography of Hazel Lavery, the painter’s wife and renowned socialite, turns her attention to the quiet partner. “What’s different about this show is that it’s about Lavery and his Irish connections.” In working on it she has, she says, substantially revised her opinion of Lavery.

Rather than follow Hazel’s lead on political issues, she reckons, he was acutely conscious of political realities and worked carefully to advance the Irish cause and position his own historical legacy. “I don’t think we’ve credited him with the level of intelligence he clearly had,” she says. Even in his autobiography, she says, he deliberately underestimates himself. “He wanted to rehabilitate and enhance Hazel’s reputation, and I now think he tended to overemphasise her role.” More accurate, perhaps, is his fairly caustic description of Hazel’s assumed Irishness and her view of Ireland: “As unreal as a mirage in a desert.”

Lavery made a fortune as a portrait painter but, says McCoole, it’s striking that virtually none of the work she’s included in the show was commissioned. He didn’t do it for money – but for passion. When he set out to paint Casement’s last-ditch appeal, he was the portrait painter of choice to the British establishment, but he chose to risk opprobrium, and perhaps his livelihood, by taking an interest in the trial of a perceived traitor.

He got permission to attend the appeal and his presence disturbed one of the prosecutors, as well as attracting a great deal of adverse comment in the press. McCoole suspects an unidentified observer in the painting is a self-portrait; Hazel is in the public gallery. It’s a powerful piece of work, depicting the machinery of the state, inexorably directed towards the extinction of the hapless Casement.

There’s a much smaller version of the painting in the Hugh Lane, but Lavery intended that the original remain in the UK, in a public collection. Predictably enough, the National Portrait Gallery in London recoiled when he offered it as a gift. He wanted, McCoole points out, a permanent reminder of what happened to Casement on view in England – the last thing England wanted. Although he bequeathed the painting to the national collections there, it normally resides – on loan – in Ireland.

On the surface, Lavery’s interest in the Casement appeal ran the risk of undermining his hard-won prestige. As McCoole says: “He didn’t need Ireland, he could have turned his back on it. He’d made it. In taking on Casement he was guided by his heart, not his head.

“But at the same time the point is that he knew he could do Ireland, it wasn’t too hot to handle for him because by then he was such a celebrity that he couldn’t be damaged by association. He was known the world over. If you were to do a major Lavery retrospective you’d have to get work from major collections in five continents.” That Lavery was knighted in January 1918 serves to illustrate her point.

His achievement of celebrity is a rags-to-riches story worthy of Hollywood at its most overblown. Born in Belfast in 1856, he was orphaned within a few years and raised on his uncle’s farm until he was dispatched to school in Scotland. He eventually absconded to Glasgow and worked as a railway clerk before returning to his uncle.

Trying Glasgow again, he found work retouching and tinting photographs but determined to become an artist, studying while supporting himself in Glasgow, then in Paris and at Grez-sur-Loing – a happy period for him.

With his peers he brought plein air painting methods back to Scotland and was known as the leader of an influential group of artists informally known as the Glasgow Boys. As official painter to the International Exhibition in Glasgow in 1888, he was charged with recording the visit of Queen Victoria: it was a huge, not immediately profitable, task – but an important stepping stone towards his becoming the foremost society portrait painter of his time, which he did in fairly quick order, moving to London in 1896. He found fame and fortune, but it’s important to add that he was industrious, prolific and immensely capable.

When he married Hazel Trudeau (née Martyn) in 1910, she quickly became a figure in high society, a role she relished and one that, it has been noted, can’t have hurt his business.

They moved in the highest circles. “Hazel wanted to be a fashion icon,” McCoole says – and Lavery was vital in managing and manipulating her image. In contemporary terms, their marriage perhaps equates to a union between a celebrity photographer and a supermodel.

In fact, widowed at a young age after a fairly unhappy marriage, Hazel was herself a capable painter; McCoole has tracked down one of her works and included it in the show. Hazel’s mother disapproved of a match with the much older Lavery – there were 24 years between them – and it was only after her death that the way was clear.

“Hazel is usually described as the daughter of an American industrialist, which suggests some wealth, but when she married Lavery she was penniless.” The couple’s involvement with Ireland is well known. Their London house serving as a meeting point throughout the Treaty negotiations. There’s been much speculation about Hazel’s relationship with Michael Collins, but McCoole’s instinct is that the relationship tends to be overstated. “Collins was adept at treating different people in different ways. He could tell them what they wanted to hear.” Lavery, she says, was tremendously interested in Ireland, but in an even-handed way, and with a sense of fairplay – until the arrival of the Black and Tans.

“That pushed him towards a more nationalist view. It’s as if he took his own Irishness on himself. He wrote to Churchill (a friend) saying the Irish should be left to look after their own affairs.”

He painted Terence McSwiney’s coffin in Southwark Cathedral after he’d died on hunger strike. He painted portraits of the delegates at the Treaty negotiations, the ratification of the Treaty in the House of Lords and eventually, sadly, the slain Collins in his coffin. “When he painted the portraits of politicians, North and South, he wasn’t thinking of profit, but of the historical record.”

McCoole has assembled a huge quantity of material for the exhibition, not alone paintings but a wealth of primary documents, photographs and even film. Her aim was to bring it all alive. Irish people, she says, tend more and more to be slightly disengaged from their history. “Because of the North, they tend not to have the references.” In the context of what was happening in the North, national history became problematic. “When you look back, it’s not remote and staid and boring – the issues are still alive. When I hear people talk about a need to define our identity now, I shake my head. It’s not a new debate. All those issues of identity are here.

“Come see this exhibition. It will challenge you on what you think being Irish is about.”

Passion and Politics: Sir John Lavery is at Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane until Oct 31