SIR JOHN LAVERY RA RSA PRP NP IS
Belfast 1856 - 1941 Kilmaganny, County Kilkenny
Ref: CC 206
The Paisley Lawn Tennis Club
Signed and dated lower right: J Lavery 1889; signed, dated and inscribed on the reverse: THE TENNIS CLUB. PAISLEY / BY JOHN LAVERY / 5 CROMWELL PLACE / LONDON and again J Lavery / 112 Bath St / Glasgow / 1889
Oil on canvas: 25 x 30 in / 63.5 x 76.2 cm
Frame size: 33 ½ x 38 ½ in / 85.1 x 97.8 cm
Provenance:
James Begg, President of the Paisley Art Institute (1920-1927); to Paisley Art Institute, in 1915
Exhibited:
Paisley Art Institute, Annual Exhibition, 1918, no.157, as Courts of the Pailey Lawn Tennis Club, June 1889
St Andrews, Crawford Art Centre, John Lavery: The Early Career, 1880-1895, 1983, no.13
Paisley Museum & Art Galleries, A Paisley Legacy: The Paisley Art Institute Collection, 2015, no.12, illus. in colour p.33
Literature:
Kenneth McConkey, Sir John Lavery, Canongate Press, Edinburgh 1993, p.42
Kenneth McConkey, ‘Tennis Parties’, in Ann Summer ed, Court on Canvas, Tennis in Art, Barber Institute & Philip Wilson Publishers, 2011, pp.63-64, illus. fig.3.17
Blossoming trees define the court in John Lavery’s depiction of the Lawn Tennis Club at Paisley in Renfrewshire. They provide partial shade for a row of spectators while a game of mixed doubles is in progress on a sunny afternoon. For the busy artist, as for the participants, this was a moment of relaxation from his labours. During the early summer of 1889 he had returned to the town 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 of the event that would take a further eighteen months to complete and which now resides in Glasgow Art Gallery at Kelvingrove.
The Paisley game was not the first Lavery had witnessed, but it was an important one. Four years earlier in the summer of 1885, he had painted The Tennis Party (fig.1) in a suburban garden, south of the Clyde, not far from the town.[2] Much has been said about the spatial stagecraft of this important work, the fact that movement in one player is reflected in another, and that it incorporates both the game and its spectators – something that remained an important aspect of the painter’s later treatments of the subject.
Fig.1 John Lavery, The Tennis Party, 1885, 30 x 72 in, Aberdeen Art Gallery
First and foremost, tennis was a social occasion on which athletic young men and women might compete together under the watchful eye of parents and chaperons.[3] To make sense of the occasion, the painter wants us to see the whole thing, not a fragment, and his format is defined by the court. Hailed as a ‘work of real talent’, the painting was admired at the Royal Academy and awarded a gold medal at the Paris Salon. With it the painter became the pre-eminent Glasgow School artist.[4] Visitors to Lavery’s studio would however discover a range of smaller works - studies of players and spectators that suggest a deeper interest in an avant-garde pastime that had swept the country, displacing croquet and other garden sports.[5] Introduced and patented by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield in 1874, boxed-sets with balls, nets, racquets and rulebooks were soon in circulation and within three years the first annual tournaments were being held at what was then the All-England Croquet Club at Wimbledon (fig.2).[6] Such was its popularity that royal sanction was conferred on the game when the Prince of Wales and his family were pictured taking to the court at Baden-Baden (fig.3).
Fig.2 FH Ayers Ltd, Wimbledon in 1880, 1880 photograph, Look and Learn Collection
Fig.3 C de G****, A Match at the Lawn Tennis Club at Baden-Baden, Edward, Prince of Wales playing Tennis …, 1883,
original source unknown, Getty Images
Thus, by the time Lavery’s pictures were painted, lawn tennis had spread to Europe and North America and was being played throughout the British Empire. Early attempts to represent its cut and thrust by Horace Henry Cauty and George Goodwin Kilburne quickly dated in favour of Lavery’s dynamism and that of his contemporaries (fig.s 4&5). Following his success in London and Paris, other painters of his generation such as Henry Herbert La Thangue, Arthur Melville, James Guthrie, painted tennis pictures (fig.6).
Fig.4 George Goodwin Kilburne, A Game of Tennis, 1882 watercolour, Private collection
Fig.5 John Lavery, A Rally, 1885, watercolour, Glasgow Art Gallery and Museums
Fig.6 Henry Herbert La Thangue, Resting after the Game, 1888, Private collection, photo courtesy Richard Green
Each of these painters reflected the new Naturalism that was sweeping through the Parisian ateliers; each admired the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage, star of the Salon, who advised Lavery to study figures in action. And there was no better place to do this than a visit to one of the recently opened tennis clubs.[7] However, while he was a keen observer of this modern pursuit, Lavery wished to retain the overall impression, as Paisley Lawn Tennis Club shows us. Figures may be darting around the court, but the world beyond them, as the French Impressionists were currently demonstrating, was also in flux, and while photographs could freeze a figure, separated from its surroundings it lacked the breath of life that painting could give.[8]As an artist-reporter, Lavery instinctively realised that stasis and kinesis in the human figure depended crucially upon the environment in which they performed. The Tennis Party had been a ‘thesis’ picture, planned and executed for a specific arena, and in this it could be counted a success. However, comparison with the much more spontaneous Paisley Lawn Tennis Club points in a different direction - one that deflects the eye from contestants seen through swaying blossom, to club-members gossip realised in vivid snapshot brushstrokes. The by-product is a unique visual charm. Before embarking on the work, Lavery produced two small sketches (figs 7&8) that are more limbering up exercises than what might strictly speaking be regarded as preparatory studies.
Fig.7 John Lavery, Sketch for ‘Paisley Lawn Tennis Club’, 1889, Private collection
Fig.8 John Lavery, Miss Alice Fulton at Paisley Lawn Tennis Club, 1889, Private collection
They tell us that what began as a picnic ensemble became a much more ambitious and unusual composition when the focus shifted to the blossoming tree, and the artist retreated to a more elevated position. In a year dominated by portrait sittings, this was an exceptional interlude. Lavery’s year had begun in a flurry of travel arrangements and studio appointments. By the late spring his State Visit project was well underway.[9] He 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 that particular day, had taken their daughter, Alice, to the local tennis club.[10] While the girl is omitted from the present larger work, both small oil sketches focus upon the spectator group at the right of the composition, and neither includes the blossoming tree and glimpse of the game which make the painting so distinctive. A note in the minutes of Paisley Art Institute in 1915 identifies the women taking afternoon tea as Mrs William Muir MacKean and Mrs Archibald Coats of Woodside, while the lady in the background wearing a red shawl was Mrs Stewart Clark of Filnside.[11] The three tennis players, glimpsed through blossoming trees are Nina Fullerton, Hugh Macfarlane and the watercolourist, Alexander Balfour McKechnie.[12] 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, Paisley, is likely to have been sited on land partly occupied by the Abercorn Bowling Club, close to the railway line (see Appendix).[13]
While these things matter, they matter less than the fact that working on the spot with only the swiftest of preliminaries, Lavery responded to the glory of the day in one of his most vivid impressions. This is no set-piece, no grand scheme, no machine du salon and we don’t see everything. What we are given is something of Baudelairean modernité in its transience and contingency, the very essence of impressionism.
Fig.9 John Lavery, Eileen, 1909, Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum
Lavery must have returned to the courts in 1909 when he painted his daughter Eileen with her racquet (fig.9), but the encounter with the game was not developed.
There was no further engagement until, in 1919, when tea on the terrace at Trent Park, the London home of Philip Sassoon, overlooked a game of tennis (fig.10). The spatial complexity of Paisley Lawn Tennis Club is ironed out to a flat north London sward. Not so, five years later when staying in the Breakers Hotel at Palm Beach he took an aerial view of the court. But this too is a simplification of the Paisley impression, its central tree reduced to a spindly palm (fig.11).
Fig.10 John Lavery, Tennis, Trent Park, 1919, William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow
Fig.11 John Lavery, Winter in Florida, 1926, Ulster Museum, Belfast
Equivalence only occurs in the winter of 1929 when Lavery, his wife and stepdaughter were staying at the ‘tennis’ Hôtel du Beau-Site, at Cannes. On this occasion, orange trees, a bone of contention among the ‘professionals’ expected to play under their shade, are swept to the sides of the gravel court, and the action is viewed through barely perceptible wire netting over the heads of three spectators.[14] Tennis had been transformed since the days of the Paisley club. Tournaments were now international and celebrity players flew from city to city, their faces appearing in tabloid newspapers. The painter’s stepdaughter, Alice Trudeau, was an aspiring competitor, seen in a vivid on-the-spot oil study (fig 12), produced on one of the few warm days during an otherwise cold winter.[15] This formed the basis of a major Academy-piece, Tennis, Hôtel Beau-Site, Cannes (fig 13), in which three identifiable spectators are re-introduced.[16]
Fig.12 John Lavery, Tennis under the Orange Trees, Cannes, 1929, Private collection, photo courtesy, Richard Green
Fig.13 John Lavery, Tennis, Hôtel Beau-Site, Cannes, 1929, Private collection
Lavery, was, of course, much more than a spectator. When faced with similar scenes of frenetic movement such as bullfights he declared, ‘… a curious thing happens when an artist sits down before his subject; material things vanish, only colour and its plots remain, and they look visionary’.[17] For the fashion-conscious factory-owners of Paisley in 1889, as the present canvas confirms, their ideal theatre for social rivalries passed through eye, brain and hand in a process of distillation. 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.
Kenneth McConkey
Appendix
Extract from the Minute Books of the Paisley Museum-Library Committee regarding the painting’s presentation to Paisley Art Institute, as typed in the minutes
TRANSCRIPTION
“The picture presented to the Institute by the president, Mr James Begg, represents the Courts of the first Paisley Lawn Tennis Club, in the summer of 1889. They were situated between Garthland Place and the Joint Line Railway, on the site now owned by the Abercorn Bowling Club.”
“The picture has a local as well as an artistic interest for Paisley, in as much as a number of ladies prominent in the Town are represented (although they are in no sense portraits). In the foreground of the picture are Mrs William Muir Mackean and the late Mrs Arch. Coats of Woodside. In the background, with a red shawl, is the late Mrs Stewart Clark of Kilnside. The players represented are Miss Nina Fullerton, Crossflat House, Mr A. B. McKenzie, R.S.W., and the late Mr Hugh Macfarlane. The picture is an excellent example of the artist’s earlier “impressionist” style, with a fine colour scheme, and an excellent open-air effect. The picture was exhibited in 1915 at the first Exhibition held in the new Galleries. This is the second gift by Mr Begg to the permanent collection, as in 1915 he purchased from the first Exhibition, and presented to the collection, the large and luminous picture, “Voices in the Woodland” by E.A. Hornel.”
[1] Lavery had spent most of 1886 in Paisley, working for clients in the textile industries; see Kenneth McConkey, John Lavery, A Painter and his World, Atelier Books, Edinburgh 2010, pp.43-48.
[2] Kenneth McConkey, 2010, pp.32-5, and note 127. Research conducted by Hugh Stevenson of Glasgow Museums has pinpointed the court in the grounds of ‘Cartbank’, a house close to the banks of the White Cart river, a tributary of the Clyde and not far from Paisley. Originally built in the eighteenth-century core, it was subsequently remodelled, becoming the family home of James MacBride, a successful lawyer, around 1860. His son, Alexander MacBride, a landscape painter, was a contemporary of Lavery’s and an exhibitor at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts. See also Roger Billcliffe et al, The Glasgow Boys, exh. cat., Glasgow Museums, 2010, pp.79-81 (entry by Hugh Stevenson).
[3] Heiner Gillmeister, Tennis, A Cultural History, 1997, Leicester University Press, 1998, p.174 ff. See also Ann Sumner (ed.), Court on Canvas, Tennis in Art, exh. cat., Barber Institute, Birmingham 2011, pp.13-14.
[4] George Moore, ‘The Salon of 1888’, The Hawk, 8th May 1888, p.259. In June 1888 when the news of his success in Paris reached Glasgow, Lavery’s contemporaries staged a dinner in his honour.
[5] See for instance, Kenneth McConkey, Lavery On Location, exh. cat., National Gallery of Ireland, 2013, no.s 14&15.
[6] Sumner (ed.), 2011, p.13. The original unappealing name, ‘Sphairistike’, was quickly dropped. Croquet received a brief revival around 1890, when painted by Lavery, but it was soon dropped in favour of its more popular rival.
[7] McConkey 2010, p.32; Sumner 2011, pp.13-14.
[8] Eadweard Muybridge’s time-series tennis-player photographs of 1887, appear stiff and posed by comparison to Lavery’s players. As a former photographer’s assistant, he would nevertheless have found the American’s experiments of interest, even though two years too late to be of use. Muybridge lectured in the Glasgow Art Club on his British tour in February 1890. As a member of the club and in Glasgow at the time, Lavery may well have attended.
[9] He had travelled south to Windsor and around Easter, to Darmstadt to paint the portrait of Princess Alix of Hesse, the future Tsarina of Russia.
[10] Both sketches painted on the spot, show Alice Fulton holding a racquet on her lap while the women on the left, one holding a scarlet parasol, have swopped places. The background, simply indicated with a broad brush, represents one of the courts.
[11] These women were of course, dynastic leaders of west of Scotland society. I am grateful to Andrea Kusel of Paisley Museum and Art Galleries for bringing this note to my attention in 2011.
[12] Both Macfarlane and McKechnie were prominent members of the club, the former taking on the role of hon treasurer by the 1891-2 season.
[13] Kusel, as above. I am also grateful to Michael Durning and Victoria Irvine, (emails 2015-8), for their valuable work on Lavery’s Fulton connections.
[14] Cannes tournaments were as famous as those of Wimbledon thanks to the wealthy British expatriates such as the Orientalist, Sir Thomas Robinson Woolfield who laid out the first court in the garden of his villa at Cannes in 1879. The lawns did not survive and were replaced with fine sand imported from the Esterels when the Beau Site opened its courts in 1881. Under the redoubtable Captain Dawson who presided over Cannes before the Great War, they were an exclusively British preserve. The only exception, the only Frenchman, was Charles Lenglen, secretary of the Nice club, whose daughter, Suzanne, along with Alain Gerbault, was to break British dominance of the Riviera game in the twenties.
[15] For further reference see Richard Green, Modern British Paintings, May 1989, exh. cat., no.1.
[16] These are Hazel, Lady Lavery, the painter’s wife talking to AC Hunter and Tom Fleming, two of the Hotel tennis afficionados; for further reference see McConkey, 2023, no.91.
[17] Walter Shaw Sparrow, John Lavery and his Work, Kegan Paul, Trubner, Trench & Co., 1911, p.98.
