Woman in black jacket

Raymond McIntyre was born in Ōtautahi Christchurch in 1879. He grew up in a musical, artistic family and enrolled at art school at the age of 15 – alongside his brother Arthur and sister Hilda. After finishing his studies McIntyre worked as a painter in Christchurch, before emigrating to London in 1909. He spent the rest of his life in the UK, where he had considerable success as an artist and critic. McIntyre painted landscapes, cityscapes and portraits, but was probably best known for his pared back, stylised portraits of women.

Woman in black jacket is a late work by McIntyre, painted shortly before he died in 1933. It is one of a number of portraits that he did of a young model called Muriel Avery – a woman who was introduced to him by his friend and fellow artist Dora McLaren. In 1931 and 1932 Avery modelled for the pair a number of times. She later wrote a wonderful description of this work, which is transcribed below.

Muriel Avery moved to London from Surrey in around 1930, at the age of 19. In London she got a job burnishing pottery made by Harold Stabler, before working for the Ministry of Supply during the Second World War. At the Ministry of Supply she met her husband, Frederick Huyghe. They got married in 1944 and Muriel began to use the name Avery Huyghe. After the end of the Second World War the Huyghes emigrated to Canada. Avery Huyghe trained there as a potter, and became an important member of studio pottery circles in Vancouver and British Columbia. She was involved in founding the local potters’ guild in the 1950s, and opened a pottery school with a fellow instructor, Hilda Ross, in 1966. Avery Huyghe sadly died, suddenly, in 1981.

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In 1974 Huyghe described her experiences modelling for Raymond McIntyre in a letter to then Director of the National Art Gallery, Melvin Day. She wrote:

‘In the winter of 1931-32, when I was twenty years old, a friend of my family introduced me to Miss Dora McLaren. She was an artist whose original training had been in lithography, and was fifteen or perhaps twenty years my senior. … She was a small-boned person with tawny, springy hair parted in the middle, a low-pitched voice, gentle manners and quick sense of the ridiculous. We sat in a basement room, warmly heated by a paraffin stove. Her large black Persian cat Pluto was there, and she remarked that she really liked short-haired cats better because you could see their lines.

Not long after this she telephoned and asked whether I would be interested, in a friendly way, in sitting for head studies by herself and another artist she’d recently met, Raymond McIntyre. I said I would, and so we began a series of sittings at 53 Great Ormond Street, London, WC1. This was a charming house of three stories and a basement, and she lived in two or three rooms on the first floor. … There was no studio, and they painted in the sitting-room at the front. Your oil, Woman in Black Jacket (actually a black wool coat I’d just bought) was one of this series, and I still have Dora’s simultaneous painting.… There was certainly a third portrait which at the time I neither understood nor liked – it was an experiment in which one half of the face was pink and the other green. Looking back, I now know that this was a sudden jump ahead of his time and usual manner, and perhaps indicated a direction in which he’d later have gone.…

I went to No. 53 whenever Dora called me, perhaps once a week when work was in progress, for most of the spring and summer of 1932. I had an excessively boring job, just outside the Temple, and I would go to Great Ormond Street at 5.30 or 6 and have a simple supper with Dora before Raymond came. Sittings lasted about an hour and a half, with short breaks, and then we had coffee which Dora made in a tall copper pot. The paintings took three or four sittings, and were done at a leisurely pace. Raymond would look with a fresh eye at what he had done the previous sitting, and perhaps decide that it was finished – "knowing where to stop" was a thing he talked about. Very occasionally we went to Raymond’s studio in Eccleston Place; unfortunately I remember little about it, except that it was large and rather bleak.…

Raymond painted on wood panels which he’d prepared with a ground. He worked almost to the finished stage in earth colours, umber or ochre, and then painted in the colour, usually low-keyed. He stood at the easel, I seem to remember, but Dora sat at hers. Canvas was expensive and Raymond’s wood panels might have a scraped-off painting on the other side. He was always good-humoured, often spluttering out some story or laughing about it. At the beginning of a sitting there’d be periods of silence while each wrestled with problems, then casual talk between him and Dora about the palette, price of paints, the merits of hog-hair brushes, techniques of etching and so on. We’d all been reading Roger Fry and Clive Bell, and there was a good deal of discussion about significant form.…

I think I did not see Raymond in 1933 but I was in touch with Dora and she continued to meet him. Then she told me that Raymond was to have a one-man show at the Goupil Gallery. We were looking forward to seeing it and I was wondering whether any of his portraits of me would be in. A few weeks later she called again with the shocking news that he’d died, quite suddenly, and the show would not take place. I went to see her; she felt his loss very keenly. I’m sure it had been a most happy friendship for both of them.…’

(Letter from Avery Huyghe to Melvin Day, 5 August 1974. Held in acquisition file for 1946-0003-3, Te Papa)