Hazel Lavery - Life

Life

Born in Chicago, Hazel Martyn was the only daughter of Edward Jenner Martyn, a wealthy industrialist of Anglo-Irish extraction. A contemporary account refers to young Hazel Martyn as "The Most Beautiful Girl in the Midwest".

In 1903, she married Edward Livingston Trudeau Jr, a physician who died five months later. In 1904, while still married to Trudeau, she met John Lavery, a Catholic-born painter originally from Belfast. Her husband died shortly thereafter, and in 1909 she and Lavery married. Subsequently she became Lavery's most frequent sitter.

During World War I, John Lavery became an official artist for the British government. In 1914, he received a knighthood, and Hazel Lavery became Lady Lavery.

A biographer of John Lavery describes:

As if in reaction to his services to the Empire, Sir John and Lady Lavery 'rediscovered' a somewhat romanticized version of their Irish roots during the 1920s; but this led to a genuine engagement with the topical question of Home Rule, and Lavery painted several portraits of Irish Republican figures, including that of Éamon de Valera – who would be instrumental in keeping Éire out of the next world war.

The Laverys lent their palatial house at Cromwell Place in South Kensington to the Irish delegation led by Michael Collins during negotiations for the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. After Lady Lavery died in 1935 in London, her funeral mass took place at the Brompton Oratory in Knightsbridge. She was buried with her husband in Putney Vale Cemetery. In Ireland, a memorial service for her took place at the request of the government.