3600

Jean Garmany Brandt 1926

Half-length to the right, her head turned and looking full face to the viewer, wearing a white satin evening dress, a yellow stole around her shoulders, drop earrings and a pearl necklace

Oil on canvas, 85.1 x 59.7 cm (33 ½ x 23 ½ in.)

Inscribed lower left: de László / 1926   

Laib L14962 (410) / C3 (6A)  

NPG 1925-27 Album, p. 9

Private Collection

This is the second of four portraits de László painted of the Brandt family. The pictures were intended to be executed around the same time but it took four years for the artist to complete the commissions. The first picture he executed was in 1925, of Jean Brandt’s youngest sister, Gwen [6371], on the occasion of her marriage to Claud Mullins. Their father, Augustus, was painted in 1927 [3585], and their mother in 1928 [3591].

The artist’s archive indicates that he painted Jean Brandt on his return from a long trip to the United States. In his appointment book for 1926, he noted on the entry for 2 May: “sittings Miss Brandt.”^[1] It seems unlikely he executed the portrait in just one day, but letters exchanged between the artist and Augustus Brandt suggest that Jean Brandt stayed with Lucy and Philip de László when he painted her,^[2] possibly over the whole week-end of the 1st and 2nd of May. On 6 May, Augustus Brandt wrote to the artist: “allow me to thank you & Mrs de László for the kindness shown to my daughter. I am grateful to you for having consented to paint her, because I fancy she is a difficult subject to paint.”^[3] When she married, a fine copy of the present portrait by Sydney Kendrick was made to hang in the sitter’s home while the original remained with her parents. De László’s fee for her portrait was £315.^[4]

Jean Brandt was born on 13 June 1900, the elder of the two daughters of Augustus Brandt and his American wife, Jean Garmany. She was brought up in Queen’s Park Gardens, in Kensington, London, and at Castle Hill, in Bletchingley, Surrey. The Brandts were of German-Russian origins and a number of their Russian relatives who had escaped the Revolution came to live with them, some for several years, making Castle Hill a lively place in which to grow up. One of Jean’s cousins, Hermann, better known as Bill Brandt, captured the atmosphere of Castle Hill and its lavish parties with his photography.

On 25 April 1929, at St Margaret’s Westminster, Jean married Bruce Earnley Money, who had homes in Mayfair, London, and in Norfolk. Like her sister Gwen, Jean loved the arts, in particular poetry and she was an amateur watercolourist. The Moneys spent much of their leisure time in their small house outside Fiesole in Italy. There were two daughters of the marriage, Elizabeth (born 1930) and Diana (born 1932), and a son, Lennox (born 1939). Jean Money died in June 1973.

LITERATURE

•László, Philip de, 1926 appointment book, private collection

•DLA057-0006, letter from Augustus Brandt to de László, 6 May 1926

•DLA057-0007, letter from de László to Augustus Brandt, 15 May 1926

•DLA057-0005, letter from de László’s secretary to Augustus Brandt, 18 May 1926

•DLA057-0036, letter from Jean Garmany Brandt to de László, 25 May 1926

CC 2012