111264

Mrs Barclay McFadden, née Virginia Heckscher 1932

Seated three-quarter profile to the left, wearing a mourning dress looking away from the viewer, her right hand on her lap touching her wedding ring on her left, gold bracelets on her left arm.

Oil on canvas, 108 x 80.6 cm (41 ½ x 31 ¾ in.)

Inscribed lower right: de László / NY. 1932. II

Sitters’ Book II, f. 71: [note above by the artist: New York.] / Virginia H. McFadden / January 30, 1932

Private Collection

The artist made five trips to America between 1908 and 1934 and his first commission on American soil was to paint President Theodore Roosevelt [5201]. The artist made four subsequent ‘Presidential’ trips to paint Warren G. Harding [5569], Calvin Coolidge [4169], Herbert Hoover [5787]. On these visits he also received commissions from influential members of society and captains of industry. De László was very well-received in America and two major exhibitions of the artist’s work were held in 1921 – one at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and the other at Knoedler’s in New York.

The sitter, Virginia Heckscher, was born in Radnor, Pennsylvania, in 1902. Described by contemporary newspapers as a “Philadelphia society girl” Virginia became engaged to Barclay McFadden in 1922 and appeared on the front pages of all the country’s newspapers when her $20,000 diamond engagement ring mysteriously disappeared. Barclay McFadden was a partner in his family’s firm, George H. McFadden and Brothers, one of the largest cotton brokers in the world, with head office in Philadelphia, agencies all over America and Europe, and plantations in Memphis. The McFaddens were keen collectors and John Howard McFadden donated his extensive collection of British art to the Philadelphia Museum of Art – including a 1916 portrait of himself by de László [6299], who also painted George [29] and Josephine McFadden [28]. The pioneering and philanthropic spirit of the people he met particularly appealed to de László: ‘I admire these self-made men of the United States and the pride they take in their successful careers, which enables them to leave fortunes for the good of mankind and which thereby immortalised them.’

It seems likely that the McFaddens met the artist through General Pershing – one of de László’s most distinguished military sitters. George McFadden worked with General Pershing throughout the First World War, who awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal in 1919. An oil painting of Pershing [6887] by de László was given to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia by George McFadden in 1923.

Virginia and Barclay had four children but their marriage was cut short when Barclay died following a fall from a polo pony in Horton, Cheshire, England in 1929.^[1] Virginia returned to Pennsylvania, where she subsequently married Alfred Harrison Geary (1893-1961) and had two further children. She died in 1988 and is buried alongside her second husband at the Church of the Redeemer Cemetery in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

This portrait, “a three-quarter length with hands” as László would describe it, shows his work at its best. He depicts the sitter, widowed only three years earlier, in a simple black dress with little artifice, framed against a typically neutral background. This, together with the fluidity of de László’s brushstrokes and his use of light, lends a sense of poignant and understated elegance to the sitter.

“She is more beautiful than ever,” wrote the artist of the sitter when he saw her on a subsequent visit to the United States in “I wish I could do more studies of her – but will do a drawing for myself.” He also noted that the sitter wished to have her daughter painted while he was in Philadelphia.^[2] Apparently neither the drawing of the sitter nor the painting of her daughter came to fruition.

PROVENANCE:

Sold at Christie’s, London, Victorian and Traditionalist Pictures, 22 November 2006, lot 213;

Private Collection

EXHIBITED:        

•Knoedler’s, New York, Portraits by Philip A. de László M.V.O., 16-28 October 1933, no. 4

LITERATURE:

•László, Philip de, 1931 diary, private collection, 28 November entry, p. 336

•Art News, vol. 32, October 21 1933), p. 6

•Jewell, Edward Alden, “Portraits by de László,” The New York Times, 25 October 1933, p. 17

With thanks to Suzanne Bailey Satow for her assistance with this entry

MD 2011