John Lavery, The First Wounded in London Hospital, August 1914
- Alan Whittle
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
John Lavery (1856-1941) was considered one of the leading artists of his day, but his reputation has fallen somewhat, certainly in the UK if not in Ireland where his work still holds pride of place in The National Gallery there. Although his work was the subject of a touring show last year, Lavery on Location, his is not the household name that perhaps it ought to be. Famed as a society portraitist on a par with John Singer Sargent, a documenter of privileged indolence, in demand by the great and the good of Edwardian London golden age society, it may be that the neglect arises from today’s art critical establishment valuing the avant garde modernism of his period more highly than it does the work of an artist determinedly pursuing a representational and technically accomplished style.
There is also a tendency to dismiss artists who enjoy privileged access to the establishment, artists whose prosperity and connections elevate them above ‘true’ artists who have to struggle for recognition. I think this prejudice risks overlooking the merits of Lavery’s accomplishments.
I noticed a reference to him in Robert Harris’s recently published novel Precipice, which charts the course of the real relationship between the Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith and the young (35 years his junior!) aristocrat Venetia Stanley, conducted through assignations in the back of the grand Napier motorcar, and via copious (daily, sometimes twice or thrice daily) correspondence. In the book, Venetia, tiring of the needy PM’s attentions and his careless sharing of top-secret war intelligence, wants to play her part in the war effort, and volunteers to become a nurse at the London Hospital in Whitechapel. Harris gives us a vivid vignette of Lavery (who in reality was similarly motivated to do his bit), painting a scene in the ward. I am guessing that Harris used Lavery’s The First Wounded in London Hospital, August 1914 as his inspiration.
This picture has a remarkable documentary feel to it. The foreground focus is on the nurse, ministering to a young, wounded soldier, a kilted Gordon Highlander. It is a sharp reminder of the consequences of war, of the results of political decisions, of war declarations. It acts as a corrective to the jingoism of the time. When it was first shown, one commentator said she could almost smell the antiseptic, so real was the atmosphere it conjured. Lavery doesn’t flinch from showing us pain and affliction. The young highlander might be lucky, just suffering what the soldiers at the time referred to as a ‘blighty’, a wound that wasn’t life-threatening but serious enough to get you out of the trenches and home to Britain. But behind him lies another figure, possibly blinded, and in the background, there is another confined to a wheelchair with multiple wounds while an amputee hobbles on crutches towards yet another ward, suggesting an endless rollcall of damaged humanity.
Some of the other detail is not only well executed with masterly mark-making and superb draughtsmanship but provides us with incidental commentary. The pipe-smoking figure (an arresting sight to modern eyes accustomed to the disapprobation of smoking, especially in a hospital) sitting by the eye-bandaged patient, his own arm in a sling, is paying his companion scant attention, absorbed in his newspaper which is doubtless reporting on the war’s progress. Does the news suggest a new cohort of wounded to follow, more pain and suffering? His ability to read certainly calls attention to the loss of his comrade’s sight and perhaps criticises his own apparent and surely misplaced equanimity. That friend’s head is tilted upwards towards the heavens, gazing mutely and sightlessly; the sorrowfulness of his condition is made plain.
The beautiful pop of colour from the fresh oranges and the yellow and mauve flowers serve to highlight the contrast between the misery and pain on the ward and what the war at the front is destroying – nature, harmony. In close proximity sits another hospital visitor, leaning anxiously towards a loved one whose wounds are possibly so dreadful that the bedside curtains have been drawn a little, to shield him from the intrusive view of others and to afford him a screen to hide the shame of disfigurement. Lavery doesn’t give us the full grotesqueness of Henry Tonks’s drawings of maimed faces (executed more for medical records and to help plan treatment than for artistic reasons), but he does capture the pervading pitiable atmosphere of the ward. The black-clothed senior doctor on the right is the only authority figure shown, his hand-in-pocket attitude denoting his class and status, drawing a distinction between him and the ordinariness of the wounded.
On the other hand, the painting does seem to me to signal hope and pride, painted early in the war’s progress and before the full horror to come. The Union flag seems defiant, its lower right quadrant illuminated. It is the quality of the light from outside which provides an antidote to the misery within. The beams of strong sunlight through the windows cast hard patterned shadows on the ward floor and lead the eye to the far enfiladed ward where another window admits light. The top half of the painting is given over to the dingy walls and ceiling, but the perspective and the foregrounded rehabilitation activity highlight above all a sense of concentrated medical competence. The light that catches the back of the red-haired soldier’s head and which also illuminates the nurse’s apron feels restorative, recuperative. Lavery was a noted pacifist and a supporter of women’s suffrage, and it is not insignificant that the painting accentuates female resourcefulness, care and capability – this is largely a women’s workplace, their domain, the obverse to the male military jurisdiction.
The other interesting aspect of Lavery’s career was his involvement in the turbulence of Irish partition. Lavery was born in Belfast to a poor Catholic family, so we might have assumed his sympathies to be obvious, yet he managed, perhaps thanks to his pacifism and the cordiality of his character, to enjoy good relations with both sides of the bitter divide, with both Nationalists and Unionists. His London home even became neutral ground for the opponents to meet during Treaty negotiations. His painting of the dead Michael Collins is particularly moving given that Lavery knew him so well and had spoken to him just days before his assassination. There is even a suggestion that Lavery’s wife, Lady Hazel Lavery had an affair with Collins. This rumour was never substantiated and is unlikely to be true, but its existence is testimony to the closeness that existed between them all.
To many, Collins was and remains the quintessential Irish national hero, as the Neil Jordan Film of his life (starring Liam Neeson) affirms, cruelly taken from us before his time. His secret intelligence network and guerilla warfare tactics were invaluable in the struggle for independence and were deployed by him ruthlessly, yet he became a pro-treaty pragmatist. He was highly sociable, companionable, direct, candid, and intelligent, qualities to which Lavery responded with some warmth. Essentially however, although both spending many years in London and enjoying the lionisation of society there, it was their shared feelings for their homeland that shone through. Lavery paints Collins lying in state, draped in the tricolour, a crucifix lying on his chest, his head propped on a velvet cushion, a saintly light cast over the death pallor of his face, a face still young and handsome – he is another embodiment of Yeats’ ‘terrible beauty’ notion expressed in his poem Easter, 1916. The tragedy of Collins’ loss is keenly felt, and the hovering inscription ‘Love of Ireland’ suggests it was an emotion felt by both the politician and the artist and possibly expresses a mordant regret that a sentiment so genuine and heartfelt had led to death.
In both The First Wounded and in Michael Collins, and even in his portraiture, Lavery communicates compassion for his subjects. He finds tenderness and humanity in his subjects but stops short of sentimentalism and it is the honesty in his work that appeals.
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