A leading light of the radical Glasgow Boys, Lavery spent the summer of 1888, painting the crowded scenes at the Glasgow International Exhibition. He was following the dictum of his hero, James McNeill Whistler that artists can find beauty where the untrained eye does not.  He also adopted Whistler’s ability to mass the composition and touch in details with a sable brush in what Lavery termed ‘the spontaneity of attack’. Whistler’s potent aesthetic pervaded not just the art of the Glasgow Boys, but of the upcoming generation of young Colourists led by Peploe and Fergusson. 

John Lavery RA RSA RHA, 1856-1941

Born in Belfast, Lavery was orphaned at an early age and sent to live with relatives in Ayrshire. A leading member of the Glasgow Boys, he studied at Glasgow School of Art, Heatherley's in London and the Académie Julian in Paris under Bouguereau. He was influenced by the work of Bastien-Lepage, and along with other young artists painted en plein air at Grez-sur-Loing. Lavery returned to Glasgow at the end of in 1884 and the following summer he completed his major work, The Tennis Party (Aberdeen Art Gallery), which was exhibited in 1886 at the Royal Academy in London and in 1890 in Munich, where it did much to establish the international reputation of the Glasgow Boys. He travelled to Morocco in 1891, and later established a winter retreat at Tangier. In 1896 he settled in London, where he found fame as an international portrait painter.