A rare portrait by Sir John Lavery that has not been seen in public in more than 100 years will go in display at the Fine Art Society this summer.
Portrait of a Lady in Grey and Black has not been exhibited since it was bought by the present owner’s grandfather Nicol Paton Brown, a patron of the artist, in 1914.
The half-length portrait of a young woman from 1901 is a study in Whistlerian greys and blacks. The young woman – who traverses the picture plane and looks around at the spectator – was identified as Miss May Robbins by the writer Walter Shaw Sparrow. Her attire “expresses a subtle bravura, and her bold rep lips punctuate the refinement”, according to the gallery.
Born in Belfast and brought up in a farm in Northern Ireland, Lavery was an apprentice to a painter-photographer in Glasgow and attended the Glasgow School of Art. He was exhibiting as an independent artist by 1879, and became a society portrait painter and official court painter.
“More and more, what you see come on to the market has been doing the rounds or you remember it being sold 10 years ago,” said Emily Walsh, the managing director of the Fine Art Society. “So it’s really nice to be able to exhibit and sell something that’s completely fresh, or hasn’t been around for more than 100 years.”
Lavery’s painting forms part of the History of the New exhibition, which is made up of 40 rarely seen paintings and pieces of decorative art, design and furniture by British and Scottish artists from the 19th and 20th centuries. It will take place at the Fine Art Society’s galleries in London and Edinburgh in June and July.
Another standout work is a rare watercolour by Charles Rennie Mackintosh called Palada, Pyrénées-Orientales, which is coming on to the market for the first time after it was bought from the artist’s memorial exhibition in 1933.
A tour de force among Mackintosh’s late watercolours of the south of France, the painting has been at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern art for many years, and depicts the village of Palada cascading down the hillside, the shadows picked out in vibrant blue.
Other works going on display include a devotional enamelware by Phoebe Traquair, the first female member of the Royal Scottish Academy; two large landscapes by William McTaggart, an oil painting by John Byrne; and furniture by Daniel Cottier, whose style came to define the Aesthetic Movement.
The Glasgow Boys – a group of radical young artists who marked the beginnings of modernism in Scottish painting – are well-represented in a group that alongside Lavery also includes Arthur Melville, Joseph Crawhall and George Henry.
One of the UK’s oldest fine art dealers, the Fine Art Society has an established reputation for its expertise in British art and design from the 19th and 20th centuries and Scottish art from the 17th century to the present day.
Walsh said the summer exhibition brought together artists “who found themselves working at the threshold of the modern”, who rejected the received wisdom of their day in favour of forging new ways of making art.
“So many of them had been artists that had broken away from previous generations and started a new movement. The modern is always applied to the 20th century, but in fact lots of artists in the late 18th and 19th century could be very modern in their outlook,” she said.
