Sir John Lavery

The Drawing Room at Mount Stewart

Mount Stewart, formerly the home of the Londonderry family, stands on the east shore of Strangford Lough in County Down. A frequent guest at the estate, fashionable portraitist John Lavery painted the drawing room a few years after the seventh marquess of Londonderry and his wife, Lady Edith, had taken up residence there.

During the 1920s, Lady Edith redecorated much of the Big House interior. She refurbished the drawing room with eighteenth-century English and Continental gilt furniture, chinoiserie lacquer, and rose, gold, and jade velvets and damasks. Sunlight streams in through tall side windows, articulating space and highlighting the rich burnish of the furniture and silver and the sheen of the fabrics. This Mount Stewart "portrait interior" is one of many works in which Lavery subordinates figure to setting - or omits human activity altogether - to depict casually elegant interiors.