DLA095-0083  Transcription

The Lady, 3 July 1924

Another art show the following day was the private view of Laszlo’s pictures at the French Gallery in Pall Mall. I went in the morning, and found a great many others had done the same thing, as most of them were going to the garden party at Buckingham Palace in the afternoon. The Italian Ambassadress, the Marchesà della Torretta, was there to see where her portrait [2340] was hung, a very charming one which I had already seen and admired at the Embassy, and Lady Davson, whose portrait [4643] I thought one of the best and most attractive of all those of the young married women of the day. She is, you know, one of Mrs. Elinor Glyn’s two daughters, and has dark hair that grows well off her forehead, and very dark blue eyes that matched her dark sapphire earrings, and an interesting face with more in it than mere beauty. Princess Andrew of Greece and her girls, Lord and Lady Astor, Lord and Lady Kerry and the Duchess of Rutland were others going round the pictures, amongst which I may mention those of Lady Chaplin [4047], Lady Londonderry’s sister-in-law, Lady Zia Wernher [1954], the Queen of Roumania [3200], Miss Muriel Wilson [10077], the Maharani of Cooch Behar [4159], and the bride Lady Apsley [3534]. The Queen of Roumania stands out with arresting beauty of form and feature, brilliantly treated wearing her great Russian diadem of diamonds, set with large sapphires, held by a chin strap chain of pearls, and an enveloping veil of fine golden tissue, over which fell a necklace of diamonds and sapphires finished with a great pendant sapphire [3200]. The effect of so much beauty of colour and form is almost dazzling. Then into the portraits of Lady Chaplin and Mrs. Crookshank an emerald tone is worked with excellent effect [4047][4130]. The former is fair and pretty, and she wears one brilliantly green jade bangle and long diamond earrings with her ivory-tinted evening dress, whilst the latter has a green bandeau on which her emerald coronal is set, and emerald rings that harmonise with her golden tissue dress. Lady Zia Wernher is another pretty woman, very like her mother in face, and her note of colour is Nattier-blue, with a yellowy scarf [1954]. Lady Apsley, again, is in pale lily-of-the-valley-green [3534], Lady Eileen Scott in a scheme of ochre [6348], and Mrs. Esmond Harmsworth wears a mauve ribbon in her hair that tones with the cluster of irises she holds in her arm [4770]. Miss Muriel Wilson, evidently painted before her marriage, is in nurse’s uniform [10077]. Mrs. John Walter wears the high comb and black lace mantilla of Spain [6953], and the Maharani of Cooch Behar is clad in her picturesque Indian dress [4159]. But if Laszlo is the ideal painter of lovely womanhood, he is also wonderfully successful in painting men’s portraits, for his “Pius XI., P.M.,” [6690] his portraits of Tittoni [7347], President of the Italian Senate, of the Italian Ambassador Marchese della Torretta [110481], of Lord Lansdowne [5959], of Admiral Sir Roger Keyes [5990], and of Lord Londonderry—the last-named seated on a sofa beneath the portrait of his great ancestor the Lord Castlereagh [6136]—to mention just a few, are masterly in treatment and execution.

MD

11/12/2007