In the summer of 1912 Lavery was commissioned to paint the British Royal Family at Buckingham Palace and sittings were booked in the King's and Queen's diaries for the following February (2). The arrangements meant that the painter's annual four month sojourn at his house in Tangier had to be abandoned and a shorter winter holiday substituted at Wengen in Switzerland. The added incentive was undoubtedly winter sports, coupled with the recent opening of the Jungfrau railway which had been under construction for nearly twenty years. Visitors could travel all the way to the summit, or stop at viewing platforms en route. The attraction was too great and in December the painter, his wife, Hazel, and step-daughter, Alice, checked in at the Hotel Regina Blümlisalp for a stay lasting until the end of January.

The 'holiday' proved to be one of the most concentrated painting episodes of Lavery's life. The visual excitement was intense. Not since the late 1880s, when he painted studies of the Glasgow International Exhibition at Kelvingrove, was he so busy, and each day brought different challenges. Skaters, skiers, sledgers and curlers, 'downhill racers' and uphill Alpinists were painted along with dramatic landscapes of the Jungfrau, the 'Mönch' and other peaks from the respendent Lauterbrunnen valley range. The weather, especially when there had been an over-night snowfall, was challenging, not least when on one occasion at the end of the holiday the eight-year-old Alice was famously heard to complain to her mother, 'isn't it a pity we married an artist!' as they posed in what must have been freezing conditions (3). Lavery reported to his daughter, Eileen, that 'the snow is so soft, Alice rolls in it like a snowball' (4).
The present canvas (fig 1) is one of four featuring Hazel and Alice.
Two landscapes set mother and daughter emerging from woodland (figs 2&3). In both, the child is seen either sitting on or dragging her luge as in the present work.
The third, Japanese Switzerland, (fig 3) presents the pair as silhouettes against a snowy hillside, its title clearly suggested by its similarity to Japanese prints (5).
Although he never visited Japan, Lavery had collected Japanese fans and other artefacts in his youth and he clearly admired the abstracting processes adopted by the Ukioye masters - their simplifications of forms and space, allied to a heightened consciousness of shape that we find in the present canvas. As in Japanese Switzerland, figures perform in front of him, and his task is to capture the moment when shape alone gives solidity to form.

Of the group, that simply entitled Switzerland, presents an additional unidentified woman, standing with Hazel on a hillside, as Alice brings up the rear. Alice's brilliant red costume is not without significance for Lavery reports that she had won first prize as 'a devil' in the hotel's costume ball wrapped no doubt in her mother's red coat, 'red stockings and red wig with horns …' (6)
Hazel's companion is unidentified, but may well be Lady Violet Frances Mabel Mond (1867-1945), who with her husband Sir Alfred Mond, and daughter, Mary, were staying at the hotel. Mary, a playmate for Alice, was the subject of a little head study as well as The Skater, (Private Collection) in an 'action' tribute to her fearlessness on the ice. The latter work was purchased by her mother before they left to return to England (7).

It is however, the remarkable spontaneity of the present canvas that makes it stand out among the Wengen group. Surveying the snowy landscape on a Swiss mountainside, according to the writer, Robert Louis Stevenson, makes 'the nerves to tighten and the mouth to smile' (8). Lavery would claim that experiences like this brought him to 'concert-pitch' and prepared him for the longeurs of portrait sittings in the London studio (9). They took him away from the plodding seriousness that face-painting had become in the hands of many of his contemporaries.
However, as the present canvas indicates, such scenes were not merely a form of limbering up. These canvases stand alone and on their merits. Each reveals the unique qualities of the moment of realization. Not merely practice pieces, as vivid impressions, they charm the eye and for the style and spontaneity in Switzerland, there is nothing quite comparable.


Kenneth McConkey


1. Erroneously dated 1918, this work dates from 1912-13.
2. Kenneth McConkey, John Lavery, A Painter and his World, 2010, (Atelier Books, Edinburgh), pp. 119-123.
3. Quoted from unpublished ms, 1924 Diary (page for 2 Jan). Also quoted with minor variation in John Lavery, The Life of a Painter, 1940 (Cassel), p. 131.
4. Letter to Eileen, dated 19 January 1913, Private Collection.
5. Kenneth McConkey, Towards the Sun, The Artist Traveller at the turn of the Twentieth Century, 2021 (Paul Holberton Publishing), pp. 240-241.
6. Ibid. Mephistopheles, the Faustian demon, is traditionally represented in bright red costume and hat.
7. Lavery's The Skater: Miss Mary Mond was sold Christie's 19 May 2000. The Mond family returned to England on 19 January 1913.
8. RL Stevenson, 'Davos in Winter', Essays of Travel, 1912 (Chatto and Windus), p. 200; quoted in McConkey 2021, pp. 81-2. Lavery's snow scenes, particularly in the present example, recall the famous sequence in DH Lawrence's Women in Love (1920). Lawrence was of course traversing the Alps from Germany to Italy in 1912-13.
9. Lavery is likely to have borrowed the expression, 'concert pitch', and the idea of being in tune with nature, from Stevenson who uses it referring to young painters in Grez-sur-Loing during Lavery's first visit to the artists'colony; see 'Fontainebleau: Village Communities of Painters', The Magazine of Art, 1884, p. 343.