Église Notre Dame des Arts, Pont de l'Arche (View of the Nave Looking Towards the Choir)

During an 1897 stay in Normandy, Lavery turned to ecclesiastical architecture — an unusual subject for a painter whose reputation rested on portraits and outdoor scenes. The church of Notre-Dame des Arts at Pont de l'Arche offered Lavery an interior study in light falling through Gothic windows into a stone nave. Church interiors had long been a testing ground for painters interested in the behaviour of diffuse, coloured light filtered through stained glass, and the tradition ran from Dutch seventeenth-century masters through to the French Impressionists. Lavery's version emphasises the atmospheric dissolution of stone columns and arched vaults in cool, ambient light rather than precise architectural record. The work entered the National Galleries Scotland and remains a relatively rare example of Lavery engaging sustained architectural painting.

Lavery handled the interior with thin, translucent glazes in the lighter passages to suggest the quality of light filtered through Gothic windows. Stone columns are built up with vertical strokes that read as architectural form while preserving a sense of atmosphere. The cool blue-grey dominant tonality is punctuated by faint warm tones near the choir.