Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe

Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe, was the most powerful press baron of the early twentieth century — founder of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, owner of The Times, and a figure whose influence on British public opinion during the First World War was immense and deeply controversial. Lavery painted him in 1921, the year before Northcliffe's death, at a moment when the press magnate was already exhibiting signs of the physical decline that would kill him at fifty-seven. The portrait is consequently a late and somewhat valedictory image of a man who had wielded extraordinary power. Lavery's social world overlapped with Northcliffe's — the painter's friend Lord Beaverbrook was himself a rival press baron — giving the commission a layer of social complexity. The National Portrait Gallery holds the canvas.

Lavery approached this late portrait with characteristic directness, concentrating attention on the sitter's face and eliminating subsidiary incident. The palette leans toward the warm ochres and earthy tones of his mature practice, with looser handling in peripheral areas. The face, by contrast, is given the most considered paint application in the work.