Lavery painting to go on public display in June

A major early work of Sir John Lavery The Return of the Goats has been acquired by the National Gallery of Ireland from a private collection in Oslo and will go on public display next June.

The picture, an oil on canvas signed and dated l884, depicts an old farmer herding his goats and was painted in the French village of Grez sur Loing, an artists' colony near Fontainebleau, during Lavery's period in France.

It was first exhibited at the Paris Salon that year and its importance according to Prof Kenneth McConkey, a Lavery authority and author of a book on the artist, lies in the instinctive way the painter grasped the central tenets of what was then avant garde French "plein air" naturalism. This was the belief that a picture "should represent lived experience, should simulate an encounter and should address the material texture of life".

Lavery once said that his stay at Grez was one of the happiest periods of his life.

Sir John Lavery l856-1941 was born in Belfast, the son of a wine merchant and became the first Irish painter to gain international recognition as a society portrait painter.

Orphaned at an early age, he began his career in Glasgow as an artist's retoucher and was commissioned in l888 to record the visit of Queen Victoria to the Glasgow International Exhibition, an event which launched his career.

Best known for the many alluring portraits of his stylish wife Hazel - she appears in some 40 paintings - he was commissioned in l927 to paint her as the image of Cathleen Ní Houlihan which appeared on Irish banknotes from 1928 to l975.

Early Lavery paintings have been achieving high auction prices. Birds at Grez sold for £1.2 million in December l998 and at Christies Scottish Sale on October 28th, his picture The Goose Girls was sold for £400,000 to a private bidder.

This painting had never been seen before and was discovered in a cottage in south west Scotland belonging to a woman in her 60s. A film documentary on Lavery is currently in production by BBC Northern Ireland and is due to be screened on BBC2 in 2006.