Herbert Barnard John Everett (1876-1949) View of the Thames Oil on panel, 25 x 34cm Signed. Inscribed verso Christmas 1896 This panel was a very precious possession of the artist and kept on...

Herbert Barnard John Everett (1876-1949) View of the Thames Oil on panel, 25 x 34cm Signed. Inscribed verso Christmas 1896 This panel was a very precious possession of the artist and kept on the mantelpiece of whatever studio he occupied from the time of its creation until he died. Oils are very rare as the artist bequeathed the entire body of his work to The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich at the time of his death. Herbert Barnard John Everett (1876-1949) Herbert Everett, a member of the Herbert Family seated at Muckross Estate in Killarney, was arguably the preeminent maritime painter of his generation. His cousin and former wife, Katherine Everett, in her Anglo-Irish memoir, Bricks and Flowers, grudingly concedes that from the time of his matriculation at The Slade School that he ''was thought to be one of the most promising students.'' She relates that the drawing instructor Henry Tonks thought his early work ''mature and excellent,'' and that the painting instructor Wilson Steer regarded him as ''being full of promise.'' Herbert, or as he came to be known, ''John,'' faced stiff competition in this estimation by his instructors, two of his classmates being William Orpen and Augustus John. The three men soon became fast friends. Everett's improbable mother, Aurelia, let rooms to both her son's friends in her house at 21 Fitzroy Street, as she did to many of the art students at the Slade School and the house soon became the Bohemian Mecca of many art students of the period. The three men often met there to ''draw at night. They picked up strange unusual models; but I was shy, after seeing John's brilliant nudes, of drawing in his company,'' records the painter William Rothenstein. One can only surmise where these models were engaged in London's Victorian Twilight. Often, it seems the trio's caroussing was funded by John Everett, he being the recipient of a private income from his Herbert relations. It is during this period that Orpen painted the full length seated portrait of Everett, now in the collection of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich to which it was transferred by the National Portrait Gallery in 1950. This portrait was among Orpen's early public submissions of his art for exhibition to the public to the New English Art Club along with his seminal works, The Mirror and A Mere Fracture as well as a portrait of Augustus John, all painted in Fitzroy Street. In this portrait, Orpen depicts Herbert ''John'' Everett, as the quintessential aristocrat, lounging cross-legged with gloves, a silk top hat, and a silver-topped walking stick before a background of his own drawings and watercolours of ships with a telescope and a roll of maps inferring the insouciance and swagger of the gentleman adventurer that Everett was to become. His training at the Slade and also subsequently at the Academie Julian in Paris encouraged him to paint en plein air and in his work we see continual experiment with brightly sunlit stippled brushwork and natural daylight tones coupled with his own sense of informality and spontaneity. John Everett was to use his private income to fund no less than 16 sea voyages including two circumnavigations during each of which he produced hundreds of paintings. He worked on deck, lashed to a mast if necessary in pursuit of truth in his art, . In the spring of 1918, he was commissioned as an official war artist and asked to produce paintings of the naval aspect of the war. This led to the end of his marriage and his whole-hearted pursuit of a life exemplified as that of a bohemian artist like that of his lifelong friend Augustus John. It is perhaps, owing to John Everett's background that we have known so little about him until recently. Not needing to generate an income from his art, he very simply never sold any of his marine pictures, albeit he did sell some of his landscapes. When he died, he bequeathed the entire body of his marine canvases, some 2000 paintings to the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich where they remain. This is the first time that any of his marine pictures have come to the public market. The landscapes offered for sale were among his private collection of his own work. Allof the lots offered were acquired by the present owner from the Everett descendants. 1. Katherine Everett; Bricks and Flowers, ''Memoirs of Katherine Everett,''Constable and Company, Ltd., London 1949. P.92. 2. Ibid., P.93. 3. William Rothenstein; Men and Memories, Volume I., P.334. 4. Bruce Arnold; Orpen, Mirror to an Age.,Jonathon Cape, London,1981.P.81.

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