Art: Colleen

Painter Sir John Lavery (who uses green in his flesh colors) was commissioned by the Irish Free State Government to paint a colleen. The painting would be reproduced on banknotes. Therefore, the colleen must be “the ideal type of Irish girlhood.”

Painter Sir John went to his wife whom he often uses as a model, told her she would have to sit again, painted her with a shawl over her head.

Last week the banknotes appeared. Smart newsmen recognized Sir John’s model-wife. Irishmen studied their money. They learned that Lady Lavery is not in her girlhood, neither is she Irish. She was the widow of Mr. Edward Livingston Trudeau of New York when Sir John married her 18 years ago. And she is from Chicago, U. S. A. Irishmen became vexed.

Nor is this the only trouble that side-burned, spectacled Painter Sir John has had with portraits of his wife. Observers recalled that Lady Cunard offered a Lavery portrait of Lady Lavery to the Tate Gallery in 1923 (TIME, Aug. 13, 1923). The portrait was refused not because of the subject’s age, not because she was not Irish. The committee simply did not like it.