Air Station, North Queensferry, 1917

Lavery served as an official British war artist from 1917, documenting naval and air activities across a range of challenging sites. The air station at North Queensferry on the Firth of Forth was one of the Royal Navy's key seaplane and airship bases during the First World War, and Lavery's commission to paint it placed him in a landscape at once industrial, military, and visually compelling. The Forth Bridge visible from North Queensferry offered one of Scotland's most dramatic engineered landmarks as a backdrop to the operational machinery of modern warfare. Lavery approached the subject as he had approached his earlier marine paintings — with an eye for reflective water, expansive sky, and the geometry of structures against light. The canvas is held in the Royal Collection.

Lavery organised the industrial subject through his characteristic tonal method: the grey-silver estuary surface provides a horizontal base against which vertical structures — hangars, masts, aircraft — are silhouetted. The sky occupies a large portion of the composition, handled with broad, mobile brushwork to suggest cloudy, diffused northern light.