Sir John Lavery R.A., R.S.A., R.H.A.

(Irish, 1856-1941)

A Moonlight Night, Tangier 36 x 64 cm. (14 1/8 x 25 1/8 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
With Frank Stevens Gallery, Montreal
Private Collection, U.S.A.

Although it lay to the west of the Greenwich meridian, Tangier provided an instant Orient for painters of John Lavery's generation. John Singer Sargent, Arthur Hacker, Solomon J Solomon, Joseph Crawhall, Arthur Melville and others had gone there before him (for a fuller discussion of British artists in Tangier, see Kenneth McConkey, Towards the Sun, The Artist-Traveller at the turn of the Twentieth Century, 2021, Paul Holberton Publishing, pp.152-171). By the time of Lavery's first expedition in 1891, the city and its inhabitants had supplied the backdrop for numerous exotic recreations of the Arab world, its myths and fables. In Tangier it was, according to the painter, Mortimer Menpes, easier to believe that the 'old Arab who emerges from the shade of a narrow street, sedate ... as the mule he rides on, has come straight from the pages of the 'Arabian Nights', than that he is an ordinary mortal, bent on some worldly twentieth century business ...' (Mortimer Menpes, World Pictures, 1902, A&C Black, 1903 ed., p.133).

None of those who disembarked on the North African beach would go on to develop a relationship with the city, its character and environs, that would last, in Lavery's case, for nearly thirty years. He alone went back to the city every year up until 1894, and then, after a long break returned to the city, acquiring a house and studio on its outskirts that he only finally sold in the winter of 1923-4. The first fruits of his return after the years of absence around the turn of the century, were displayed in London at the Goupil Gallery in 1908 and among these was a small group of nocturnes which one reviewer claimed, had surpassed those of Whistler and were the best since Turner (ACR Carter, 'Recent Work by Mr Lavery', The Art Journal, 1908, p.234). They were housetop and beach scenes, and they described the moments when the city fell silent and was clothed in silver moonlight.

In the Medina, its tiny alleyways so narrow that they could not be navigated by horses or camels, donkeys were the only means of transport ('...even the panniers of a donkey would scrape upon either side', wrote Arthur Jerome Weston in 'From Spanish Light to Moorish Shadow', Scribner's Magazine, vol.13, no.2, 1893, p.202). As soon as one arrived on Tangier beach, there being no deep harbour, it was to be greeted by a donkey and its urchin owner, offering taxi services (Op.Cit., p.201). As a seasoned visitor, Lavery had painted these beasts of burden in the 1890s but it was only with the present work that their nocturnal movements are recorded. Their way was lit by lanterns – houses having few windows in their outer walls and there being no street lighting. At these moments Menpes's segue into the One Thousand and One Nights seems apposite and it recalls the tale of Noureddin Ali illustrated by William Orpen (there is no evidence that Lavery saw Orpen's drawing, although he would have been aware of popular translations of the One Thousand and One Nights by Edward William Lane and Richard Burton).

For all its detail, Orpen's drawing lacks the authenticity and on-the-spot atmospherics of Lavery's painting. Zig-zag shadows place Lavery's figures securely in space, while the Moorish boy, in charge of both animal and lantern is lighting the traveller's path. There may be no narrative other than that contained in the short passage of figures across the painter's field of vision and mystery, if any is implied, must surround the white-clad figure. Exceptional in its theatricality, Lavery's excursion on a moonlit night in the city known to all in the blazing sun as 'La Blanca', is remarkable.

We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for compiling this catalogue entry.