• Kenneth McConkey
  

• John Lavery
  

• 
  Winter 2018
  Volume 35. No. 4

Museums and Collections
Eileen Lavery
John Laverly
Kenneth McConkey

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Whistler called her the ‘Little Lady of the Holy Heart’ when he was introduced to her as the daughter of his host, John Lavery. A sevenyear- old, she was back from the Sacred Heart Convent at Roehampton, to her new home in Cromwell Place, South Kensington. It was something of a social thoroughfare for the biggest room in the house was given over to her father’s studio where models posed, sitters came and went, dealers paid court and artists, mostly expatriate Scots, turned up for smoky meetings. Lavery was plotting an important new society that would explicitly promote international cross-fertilization in painting, sculpture and printmaking and his friends gathered round. To a child it might all have seemed both bewildering and exciting, had Eileen Lavery not been living with painters since birth when two of her father’s closest friends had helped to look after her. One was the much cherished ‘Uncle Whyte’ – William Patrick Whyte – who had been a student companion of her father in Paris, and the other was a quirky fellow from an old Northumbrian family – Joe Crawhall – a gifted watercolourist who dedicated a whole sketchbook, full of funny little drawings of animals, to her. But these sank into the background when James McNeill Whistler came to stay. An American in his mid-sixties who had arrived from Paris, he was to be President of this new ‘International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers’.