R.B. Cunninghame Graham on 'Pampa' – Lavery

Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham was one of the most improbable figures of his era: Laird of Gartmore, a radical Scottish MP arrested at the 1887 "Bloody Sunday" riot in Trafalgar Square, founder of both the Scottish Home Rule Association and the Scottish Labour Party — and, for a stretch of his younger years, a gaucho on the Argentine pampas known as "Don Roberto," who later ran a fencing school in Mexico City under an assumed name. He met Lavery in Tangier in 1893, reportedly after stopping the artist's runaway horse.

Lavery painted a grand formal portrait of Graham on his horse Pampa for the 1898 Paris Salon — now held by the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires. This smaller, more intimate canvas was likely painted in preparation for that larger work, but Lavery held onto it and only gave it to Graham when the two men met again, inscribing it in 1901. Pampa himself had been a rescue: Graham spotted the horse harnessed to a Glasgow tram, plainly unsuited to the work, and gave him a different life entirely.

The friendship outlasted the portrait. In 1904, Graham wrote the introduction to Lavery's solo exhibition catalogue at the Leicester Galleries; in 1907 the two travelled to Fez together. As late as 1933, passing Tangier on a cruise, Lavery was still writing to him, fondly remembering their early days there.

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