5153

Mrs Kermit Roosevelt, née Belle Wyatt Willard 1914

Head and shoulders to the right, her head turned and looking to the left, wearing a plain white blouse with a collar under a dark dress, a small pearl or gold necklace just visible at the neckline

Oil on board, 90.8 x 67.3 cm (35 ¾ x 26 ½ in.)

Inscribed lower right: P A de László / LONDON 1914 Oct. 3

Laib L7536 (788) / C23 (14)  

Sitters’ Book I, f. 99: Belle Willard Roosevelt / October 4th 1914

Private Collection

This portrait was painted in the year of the sitter’s marriage to Captain Kermit Roosevelt, who was painted by de László in military uniform in 1917 [5152]. The artist had previously painted the portraits of the sitter’s father-in-law, Theodore Roosevelt, while he was President in 1908 [5201], again in 1910 [5205], and Mrs Roosevelt in 1908 [5203]. He would later paint the sitter’s father, Joseph E. Willard [6777] and her sister, Miss Mary Elizabeth Willard in 1917 [3392] and 1920 [7738].

Belle Wyatt Willard was born on 1 July 1892 in Baltimore, Maryland, daughter of American diplomat Joseph Edward Willard (1865-1924), owner of the famous Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, and his wife, Belle Layton Wyatt (1875-1954). She grew up in Fairfield and Richmond, Virginia, and often spent time in Europe, where she studied painting. On 10 June 1914 she married Kermit Roosevelt (1889-1943), second son of Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) and his second wife, née Edith Kermit Carow, in the Chapel of the American Embassy in Madrid, where her father was serving as U.S. Ambassador to Spain. At first they settled in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where Kermit Roosevelt worked for the American owned National City Bank, then, during the First World War, the new Mrs Roosevelt lived in Madrid, while her husband fought in the Middle East with the British Army. After the war they settled in New York, where the sitter’s husband began his career in the shipping business and established the Roosevelt Steamship Co. They had three sons: Kermit Jr, (born 1916, Buenos Aires); Joseph (born 1918, Madrid); Dirck (born 1925, New York); and a daughter, Belle (born 1919, New York).

The Roosevelts lived in the Lenox Hill area of New York, and the sitter was active both in the Lenox Hill Neighborhood Association and on behalf of the Lenox Hill Hospital until the outbreak of the Second World War. During the war she established a junior division of the British War Relief called Young America Wants to Help. Her husband, after many years of struggling with depression, took his own life while serving with the American Army in Alaska. Belle Roosevelt donated his papers and letters—some 25,000 items—to the Library of Congress.

After her husband’s death, Belle Roosevelt, described as “a slender, quick-moving, reddish blonde with a freckled nose”^[1] was a frequent guest at the White House during the tenure of her husband’s distant cousin, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The President often described her as his “favorite Oyster Bay Roosevelt.”^[2] In 1944, she campaigned for his re-election to a fourth term as president, despite the fact that he was a Democrat and the rest of her Roosevelt family were the supporting Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican Governor.

She later settled in a 13-room house in Sutton Place, in New York City, where she "received her guests in a wood-paneled library, where a John Singer Sargent sketch of her husband was hung above a black marble mantel. She was seated in a blue velvet Louis XVI chair, part of a circle of Chippendale chairs.”^[3] In 1956 she donated a collection of 16th- to 18th-century Spanish-Moorish decorative arts to the Norfolk Museum, Norfolk, Virginia, where it was named The Belle Wyatt Willard Collection in honor of her mother.^[4] 

Belle Roosevelt died of cancer at her Sutton Place home on 30 March 1968. She had once told a friend, “The one thing I asked in life was that it shouldn’t be monotonous, and dear knows, it hasn’t been that. Being married to a Roosevelt is an active life—and that’s an understatement.”^[5]

The sitter was also painted as a young woman by Paul Emile Chabas (1869-1937)^[6] and drawn by John Singer Sargent in 1921.

LITERATURE:

•The New York Times, 26 April 1931, ill.

•László, Philip de, 1933-1934 diary, private collection, 7 March 1934 entry, p. 126; 8 March entry, p. 127

•Morison, Elting, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1954, p. 1279

•Boera, A. Richard, ”The Rest of the Story: “Official” Copies of Philip de László’s 1908 Painting of Theodore Roosevelt (and More), Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, Volume XXXVII, Number 4, Fall 2016, p. 27

MD 2012