Why did this brilliant Irish artist fall off the radar? 

Sir John Lavery has always had a place in Irish affections. His depiction of his wife, Hazel, as the mythical figure of Cathleen ni Houlihan, which appeared on the old ten shilling and subsequently on the watermark of the Irish pound notes, meant, as the joke went, that every Irishman kept her close to his heart. He was indeed Irish – born in Belfast – but was at home in Scotland, and was the best known of the spirited group of painters called the Glasgow Boys. Yet he lived most of his life in London, was friends with Winston Churchill (they took a painting trip together) and also with Michael Collins, the Irish Nationalist, with whom Hazel was, ahem, close. If ever there were a man who embodied the interconnectedness of Britain and Ireland, it was Lavery.

But France loomed large too. He trained in Paris, hero-worshipped the naturalist Jules Bastien-Lepage and was part of the cosmopolitan group of artists who congregated at Grez-sur-Loing in the 1880s, where every laundry maid must have been stalked by men with canvases. There’s a lovely picture by Lavery of ‘The Bridge at Grès’ (1901), showing the play of light on a stretch of the river.

That painting comes at the start of a splendid exhibition of his work at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, which, appropriately, will then travel to Belfast and Edinburgh. It’s called Lavery. On Location, and there were a bewildering number of locations – France, Ireland, Scotland, Tangiers (where he wintered for decades), Germany, Switzerland and, at the end of his life, New York and California. The man who began as a naturalist with impressionist ways – painting outdoors, obsessed with the play of light on surfaces and focusing on everyday subjects – ended painting skyscrapers, Shirley Temple and young women sunbathing in Palm Springs on the eve of the second world war.