A Grandmother's Birthday and The Auld Alliance

By Duncan MacMillan, 14.02.2022

John Henry Lorimer, Benedicité, Fête de gran’mèr, 1893. RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay).

In John Henry Lorimer’s Benedicité — Fête de gran’mère, a grandmother is celebrating her birthday with a dozen small children. Seated round the table, their heads are bowed as grace is said. Blue twilight is visible through a tall window, but the main light is from four shaded candies on the table. The tablecloth is white and as they bow their heads the children’s faces are lit by the candlelight reflected upwards from the cloth. Two maids and a nanny holding a baby look on. Unlike the lit faces of the children, they and the grandmother herself are in half-light. An empty chair suggests a significant absence. The picture is a quiet, beautiful study of light, of mood, of innocent reverence and of age. 

In spite of its beauty, when the picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1893 the reviews were hostile. Perhaps the critics sniffed a trace of the deadly Impressionist virus. If so they were quite wrong. Lorimer knew Monet’s work, but seems to have been untouched by it. It was Millais’s St Agnes Eve, not Monet, that had inspired the magical lighting in Benedicité. Lorimer had seen Millais’s picture in London in 1886 and it finds echoes in several of his other paintings. He had however, certainly also looked very closely at the combination of candlelight and twilight in Holman-Hunt’s Light of the World, also exhibited in 1886.

After the hostile reception in London, in 1894 Lorimer showed his picture at the Salon in Paris where in contrast it was very warmly reviewed. The artist Paul-Albert Besnard wrote in l’Independence Belge: “How can I tell of the power of this white ensemble, where the blue of the dying day and the yellow light of the candles lightly play? It would be impossible for a simple painting to say more.” Then, the ultimate accolade, the picture was bought by the French State, the first by a Scottish artist to enjoy that honour, and indeed only the third by any British artist, and the two previously so honoured, Whistler and Sargent, were both Americans. 

Lorimer had not just turned to Paris in a fit of pique, however. He had first showed in the Salon in 1892 with Portrait de Mon Père - his father with a little dog - and Berceuse (Lullabye is its English title), and the latter, a picture of his sister’s Guyanese nanny, Joanna Herbert, rocking a cradle, won a medal (Joanna also appears in Benedicité.) In 1893, Lorimer showed The Ordination of the Elders which was also well received. Then, after his success with Benedicité, in 1896 he won a second-class medal for Mariage de Convenance, also called The Eleventh Hour, but his other exhibit, a striking full-length portrait of Col. James Anstruther Thomson, became his second picture to be bought by the French State. 

Lorimer did buy a house in London, but he never moved permanently from Scotland and he was also perhaps predisposed to look to France rather than to England. When he first sent his work to Paris, his mother remarked how much his father, Professor James Lorimer, who had died two years before, would have approved. James Lorimer, professor of public law at the University of Edinburgh, was a pioneer of women’s rights, but also of the idea of international law and of the institutions that might maintain it. He was however also an old-style European Scot who found the audience for his ideas more in France and elsewhere on the Continent than in England. Correspondingly he also evidently believed in the importance of the Auld Alliance, as too did his younger contemporary in Edinburgh, Patrick Geddes. Lorimer’s restoration of Kellie Castle in Fife, a monument of historic Scottish architecture which became the family home, his architect son Robert’s deeply sympathetic understanding of that tradition and John Henry’s own pioneering and ultimately successful championing of the vernacular architecture of the ancient ports of East Fife, which later became The National Trust’s Little Houses scheme, all show a belief in the old, pre-union Scotland of the Auld Alliance.

John Henry’s success in France continued and in 1900 he assisted with the Paris Exposition Universelle. Then in recognition of his services to France, in 1912 he was nominated for the Legion d’Honneur, but to his deep chagrin pettifogging bureaucrats wouldn’t let him accept it. He was not forgotten in France though and for many years Benedicité hung in The Luxembourg, Paris. There on general view, Esther Chalmers, the artist’s niece, one of the six children of his sister Hannah, records how it also “delighted the small daughters of the curator who, every evening, had to be taken to say goodnight to our grandmother whose party it is, before they would consent to go to bed.” This charming memory is testimony to the picture’s appeal, certainly to children, but no doubt to the wider French public too. ‘Our grandmother’, whose birthday Esther tells us the picture represents, was Hannah, the Lorimer matriarch. (I am indebted to the artist’s great-great-niece, Charlotte Lorimer, for passing on this charming memory.) The empty chair is most likely a poignant reference to her husband, the professor’s, still recent death. The twelve children were grandchildren and the children of neighbours and friends, but the baby in the picture is Esther’s brother, James. 

Lorimer mostly made his living by painting portraits, but his narrative pictures were almost all set, as this one is, in Kellie Castle. In its beautiful interiors, Lorimer’s mother, his sisters and his nieces provide the action, whether sewing in A Peaceful Art, or watching the departing swallows in The Flight of the Swallows. Although it is unstated, we sense that what we are seeing in all these pictures is a relaxed and loving domestic world. Perhaps this is what the French critics and jury also saw in the picture. They must certainly have seen how beautifully Lorimer had rendered a scene dominated by children.

Victorian narrative paintings of children are not often great art. Lorimer nevertheless managed it brilliantly and here the prime exemplar, of course also Scottish, was Wilkie. Children feature constantly in his art. Always complete in their dignity, they are there as mentors of adult sensibility. Wilkie’s Grace Before Meat also has the same subject as Lorimer’s painting, the blessing before food and the children’s innocently reverent response to it. Lorimer’s teachers at the Royal Scottish Aacademy, G.P.Chalmers and William McTaggart, carried on this tradition. Chalmers’s painting of children in The Legend, for instance, is outstanding. Wilkie had enjoyed considerable reputation in France. Indeed the little boy standing beside the painter in Courbet’s L’Atelier du Peintre has walked straight out of Wilkie’s painting of The Jew’s Harp. Perhaps the French jury recognised this continuity. They certainly recognised the quality of the picture as outstanding even among nearly two thousand others on display. Touchingly, the French do remember the ancient friendship of the Auld Alliance and so perhaps that memory played a part here too. 

Duncan Macmillan is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, an art critic and art historian. 'Reflections: The light and life of John Henry Lorimer (1856-1936)' is exhibited at the City Art Centre until Sun 20th March 2022. The exhibition has been curated by Charlotte Lorimer, on whose initiative, Benedicité, the picture of her great-great-grandmother’s birthday party, has been brought out from decades of storage in the Musée d’Orsay to delight the Edinburgh public. Kellie Castle is now owned by the National Trust for Scotland.