SIR JOHN LAVERY R.A., R.S.A., R.H.A., P.R.P., H.R.O.I., L.L.B. (IRISH 1856-1941)

SIR JOHN LAVERY R.A., R.S.A., R.H.A., P.R.P., H.R.O.I., L.L.B. (IRISH 1856-1941)
PAISLEY LAWN TENNIS CLUB
Signed and dated 1889, oil on canvas
63.5cm x 76cm (25in x 30in)
Presented by James Begg, Esq., President of Paisley Art Institute (1920-27), 1917.
Exhibited:Paisley, Paisley Art Institute, Annual Exhibition, 1918, no.157, where titled ‘Courts of the Paisley Lawn Tennis Club, June 1889’;St Andrews, Crawford Art Centre, John Lavery: The Early Career, 1880-1895,1983, no.13;Paisley, Paisley Museum & Art Galleries, A Paisley Legacy: The Paisley Art Institute Collection, 2015, no.12.Literature: McConkey, Kenneth, Sir John Lavery, Canongate Press, Edinburgh, 1993, p.42;McConkey, Kenneth, ‘Tennis Parties’, in Ann Sumner ed., Court on Canvas, Tennis in Art, Barber Institute & Philip Wilson Publishers, 2011, pp.63-64, repr. fig 3.17. During the early summer of 1889 Lavery returned to Paisley to make kit-kat sketches of dignitaries who had been invited to the reception held for The State Visit of Queen Victoria to the Glasgow International Exhibition in the previous year.[1] These tiny portraits would come together with 250 others in a large commemorative canvas depicting the event (Glasgow Museums). His year had begun in a flurry of travel arrangements and studio appointments. By the late Spring the project was well underway. Lavery had just returned from Darmstadt where he had painted the portrait of Princess Alix of Hesse (Private Collection), and other members of the royal retinue, when the short trip from Glasgow to Paisley took place. A visit, however brief, could not be made without calling upon friends in the town where he had staged his first solo exhibition in 1886. Principally these were members of the Fulton family who, on one particular day, had taken their daughter, Alice, to the local tennis club. [2]  While the girl is omitted from the present canvas, both small oil sketches produced in preparation for it include her, while focussing upon the figure group at the right of the composition. A note in the minutes of Paisley Art Institute in 1915 identifies the women taking afternoon tea as Mrs William MacKean and Mrs Archibald Coats of Woodside, while the lady in the background wearing a red shawl was Mrs Stewart Clark of Filnside.[3] The three tennis players, glimpsed through blossoming trees are Nina Fullerton, Hugh Macfarlane and the watercolourist, Alexander Balfour McKechnie.[4] The note concludes by describing the present work as ‘an excellent example of the artist’s earlier “Impressionist” style’, implying that, as with the preparatory sketches, it was completed on the spot. The spot, the original Paisley lawn tennis club in Garthland Place, is likely to have been sited on land partly occupied by the Abercorn Bowling Club, close to the railway line.[5]Lawn tennis was, by 1889, approaching the height of its popularity. Invented by Major Clopton Wingfield in 1874, with the unappealing name, ‘Sphairistike’, it quickly replaced croquet as a middle-class pastime when boxed sets of essential equipment went on the market.[6] For the fashion-conscious factory-owners of Paisley, as the present canvas confirms, it provided the ideal theatre for social rivalries. For the artist however, in the midst of a year when time was measured in end-on appointments, dropping into the Paisley Lawn Tennis Club was a moment of delight. One had only to open a little pochade box or erect a lightweight tripod easel for the picture to come to him, unbidden. Lavery would later describe such moments as ones that brought him to ‘concert pitch’. These were times when in an elysian garden of women, the scene composed itself if you were quick enough to grasp its essence. In the present instance, there was no hesitation.We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for writing this catalogue entry.[1]          McConkey 2010, pp. 43-48.[2]          Two sketches are known to have been painted on the spot. A companion sketch (Private Collection) shows Alice holding a racquet on her lap while the women on the left, one holding a scarlet parasol, have swapped places. The background, simply indicated with a broad brush, represents one of the courts.[3]          These women were of course, dynastic leaders of west of Scotland society. I am grateful to Andrea Kusel of Paisley Museum & Art Galleries for bringing this note to my attention in 2011.[4]          Both Macfarlane and McKechnie were prominent members of the Club, the former taking on the role of Honorary Treasurer by the 1891-92 season.[5]          Kusel, as above. I am also grateful to Michael Durning and Victoria Irvine, (emails 2015-18), for their valuable work on Lavery’s Fulton connections.[6]          Sumner, 1911, p. 13.