 Amber Necklace |
 Gin Glass |
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 Irish Lady's Tresses Orchid |
 The Lennox Quilt |
 Fossil Crinoids |
 Madonna and Child |
 A Red Alga |
 Irish Wolfhound |
 Coates Family Photograph |
 Chinese Ivory Puzzle Ball |
 Early Medieval Tomb-shaped Shrine |
 The Green Coat, Sir John Lavery |
 Juvenile Bald Eagle |
The Green Coat (1925/6), Sir John Lavery (1856-1941). Copyright Estate of Sir John Lavery/Felix Rosenstiel's Widow & Son Ltd.
Oil on canvas
Donated by the artist, 1929
Accession number: U68
Height: 1984 mm, Width: 1978 mm
Sir John Lavery R.A. (1856-1941) was born in Belfast but began his career as a painter in Glasgow. In 1888 he was commissioned to record the state visit of Queen Victoria to the Glasgow International Exhibition and the resulting studies launched his career as a society portrait painter.
This work portrays Hazel Martyn, the beautiful and brilliant daughter of a Chicago industrialist of Irish descent, who married Lavery in 1909. The couple had met in Brittany in 1904 when Hazel was travelling with her mother. Hazel Lavery was to inspire many of Lavery's portrait studies and she can justly be considered his muse. Famous for her great beauty and poise, her social ease and popularity further enhanced his career.
The Laverys followed political events in Ireland closely and their friendships with Winston Churchill and Michael Collins played an important intermediary role in the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations in 1921. After the assassination of Collins, Lavery painted Michael Collins 'Love of Ireland', now owned by the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin.
In 1927 Lavery was commissioned to paint an idealised head of Hazel as Kathleen Ni Houlihan which appeared on the Irish currency from 1928 to 1975.
Comment
Anne Orr, Acting Registrar
I fell in love with this painting the first time I saw it, finding it incredibly evocative of the 1920s. Hazel's serenity shines out of the work, which has a glow in real life, hard to reproduce in a photograph. To my mind Lavery's portrait has also captured the couple's mutual love. In 1929 Hazel wrote of this painting "It is to my thinking the best one of me he has ever painted ... and I like to have the best of his work seen in Belfast, his own native land and city".
