A SELF-PORTRAIT by Irish artist Sir John Lavery depicting himself and Shirley Temple – the most famous child star in Hollywood film history – has turned up in a Scottish saleroom and is expected to fetch up to £60,000 (€76,500) at auction next month.
The painting was made in 1936 when Lavery – by then one of the world’s best-known portrait painters – was aged 80 and Temple was aged eight.
The oil-on-canvas, measuring 41 by 22 inches, was exhibited to great acclaim in Scotland and London later that year and in Dublin in 1937.
It was subsequently bought by a private collector at auction in 1949. Now it is back on the market.
Edinburgh fine art auctioneers Lyon and Turnbull said the painting, titled: Shirley Temple and the Painter, would be auctioned on September 7th with a pre-sale estimate of £40,000- £60,000.
It is being sold by the heirs of Donald Taffner, a New York television executive and prominent art collector who died last year.
Lavery had sailed to the United States in 1936 with the express intention of painting Hollywood stars.
He secured permission to paint Temple at his hotel in Palm Springs, California. The painting shows the child star holding a croquet mallet (a game she had famously played with Orson Welles and Gary Cooper) and Lavery himself – palette and brushes in hand – wearing fashionable two-tone shoes stepping out from behind the canvas to greet her.
Temple was born in 1928 and began her film career as a three-year-old. She starred in a series of comedy-dramas in which she sang and danced.
Films such as Bright Eyes (released in 1934, in which she sang On the Good Ship Lollipop), Curly Top, The Little Colonel, The Poor Little Rich Girl and Heidi made her a major box-office star in America and worldwide during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
