Hazel Lavery

Biography

Hazel Lavery, Lady Lavery (née Martyn; 1880–1935) was an American painter and the second wife of portrait artist Sir John Lavery. Famed for her beauty, Lavery's likeness appeared on banknotes of Ireland for much of the 20th century.

== Early life == Born in Chicago on 14 March 1880, Hazel Martyn was the daughter of Edward Jenner Martyn, a wealthy industrialist of Irish descent. A contemporary account refers to young Hazel Martyn as "The Most Beautiful Girl in the Midwest". Hazel had one sister, Dorothea Hope "Dorothy" Martyn (1887–1911), who was an aspiring playwright. Suffering from anorexia nervosa, Dorothy died in 1911 aged 23, and it was her death that spurred Hazel to leave America.

== Personal life ==

In 1903, Hazel Martyn married Edward Livingston Trudeau Jr, son of Edward Livingston Trudeau, a physician who advanced the treatment of tuberculosis. Trudeau died five months later from an embolism brought on by pneumonia. They had one daughter, Alice, born 10 October 1904 (Alice later spent much of her life in Ireland, marrying first John A. McEnery of Co. Kilkenny, then after being widowed, in 1963 she married historian Denis Rolleston Gwynn). Hazel Martyn first met John Lavery, a Catholic-born painter, originally from Belfast whilst engaged to Trudeau. In 1909 she and Lavery married after the death of her mother who was opposed to the match. Subsequently, she became Lavery's most frequent sitter.

During World War I, John Lavery became an official artist for the British government. In 1918, he received a knighthood, and Hazel Lavery became Lady Lavery. The Laverys lent their palatial house at 5 Cromwell Place in South Kensington to the Irish delegation led by Michael Collins during negotiations for the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. Hazel Lavery died of a heart attack on 3 January 1935 at her home in London, having been suffering ill health for over a year after an operation to remove a wisdom tooth, with her husband and daughter at her side. Her funeral mass took place at the Brompton Oratory in Knightsbridge. She was buried in Putney Vale Cemetery. In Ireland, a memorial service for her took place at the request of the government. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Sir John Lavery moved to live with his stepdaughter Alice McEnery, at Rosenarra, Kilmoganny, Co. Kilkenny, Ireland and died there in January 1941. He was initially buried at Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin but was reinterred next to Hazel Lavery in Putney Vale Cemetery in 1947.

== Irish banknotes ==

After the Anglo-Irish treaty, the Irish Free State government invited John Lavery to create an image of a female personification of Ireland for the new Irish banknotes. Such a personification harks back to figures in ancient Irish mythology and has been exemplified in recent centuries by women such as James Clarence Mangan's Dark Rosaleen and W. B. Yeats' Cathleen Ní Houlihan. This personification of Ireland, modelled on Lady Lavery and painted by her husband, was reproduced on the Series_A_banknotes of Ireland from 1928 until the 1970s. It then appeared as a watermark on Series B and Series C notes until the latter were replaced by the euro in 2002.

== Other portraits ==