Wimbledon Tennis Championships

Richard Green is delighted to have assisted in the loan of Sir John Lavery’s, The Paisley Lawn Tennis Club, now part of an important private tennis collection, to the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) during the Wimbledon Tennis Championships. This important painting, previously owned by Paisley Art Institute, documents a game of mixed doubles in the summer of 1889. A note in the minutes of Paisley Art Institute in 1915 identifies not only the three tennis players, Nina Fullerton, Hugh Macfarlane and the watercolourist, Alexander Balfour McKechnie, but also the women taking afternoon tea, Mrs William Muir MacKean and Mrs Archibald Coats, while the lady in the background wearing a red shawl was Mrs Stewart Clark.

 

Four years earlier in the summer of 1885, Lavery painted The Tennis Party (Aberdeen Art Gallery), in a suburban garden, south of the Clyde, not far from Paisley, which was admired at the Royal Academy and awarded a gold medal at the Paris Salon. With it the painter became the pre-eminent Glasgow School artist. Following his success, Lavery painted other tennis pictures, which grace the collections of Glasgow Art Gallery and Museums, William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, Ulster Museum, Belfast and a painting of his daughter, Eileen, 1909, holding a raquet, at the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum.

 

Richard Green sold the stylish watercolour, After the tennis match by John Scott to the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum in 2000.

Sir John Lavery
Belfast 1856 - 1941 Kilmaganny, County Kilkenny 
The Paisley Lawn Tennis Club
Signed and dated lower right: J Lavery 1889; signed, dated and inscribed on the reverse: THE TENNIS CLUB. PAISLEY / BY JOHN LAVERY / 5 CROMWELL PLACE / LONDON and again J Lavery / 112 Bath St / Glasgow / 1889
Oil on canvas
25 x 30 in / 63.5 x 76.2 cm

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John Scott
1850 - London - 1918 
After the tennis match
Signed
Watercolour
11 7/8 x 20 in / 30.2 x 50.8 cm

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