9942

UNTRACED

Marian Hoffman 1924

Standing three-quarter length in a landscape and looking to the left, wearing a light coloured gown, trimmed with lace, a dark sash round her waist, holding a hat in her right hand, with Blickling Hall in the background

Oil on canvas, [dimensions unknown]

Inscribed lower right: de László / 1924 LONDON   

Laib L11576(799) / C12(32) Miss Hoffman

Sitters’ Book II, opp. f. 39: Marian N. Hoffman 18 Feb. 24

This portrait was commissioned by Zelia Hoffman before her daughter’s marriage in November 1924. Mrs Hoffman had moved to England after the death of her husband in 1919 and rented Blickling Hall, near Aylsham, Norfolk, which appears in the background of this portrait. The painting hung in Mrs Hoffman’s London residence at 40 Grosvenor Square.^[1] De László also painted a study portrait [111833] of the sitter wearing a large black hat, for the sitter to take with her when she returned to America, in October 1924. This was something the artist did for sitters he particularly enjoyed painting and these souvenir portraits were often completed without the sitters’ knowledge. Both portraits of Marian Hoffman were shown at the artist’s solo exhibition at the French Gallery in June 1924. A preparatory drawing is listed in the Studio Inventory but is currently untraced [112313].

Marian Krumbhaar Hoffman was born 15 December 1901 in New York, daughter of Charles Frederick Hoffman (1856-1919) and Zelia Krumbhaar Preston (1864-1929).^[2] Her father was President of the Union Club, Treasurer of the Cathedral of St John the Divine, and a Trustee of Columbia University, and lived in Newport, Rhode Island, where he owned Armsea Hall. After the death of her father in 1919 she inherited the sum of $50,000 a year until she reached the age of twenty one, when she received his $5 million estate.  

On 29 November 1924, in the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York City, she married Aymar Johnson (1883-1942), son of Bradish G. Johnson of New York and Woodland, East Islip, Long Island and his wife, née Aimee Gaillard. The sitter was presented at Court at Buckingham Palace on 26 June 1929. Her daughter Zelia was born in London on 20 September 1929, just five days after the death of the grandmother after whom she was named. Zelia Hoffman had become a naturalized British subject the year before and had unsuccessfully run for Parliament just before she died.

The sitter and her husband continued to live at Armsea Hall, a large porticoed Palladian villa designed by New York architect Francis Laurens Vinton Hoppin. Aymar Johnson was a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve during the Second World War but fell ill while en route to resume his duties in Bermuda and died in 1942. The sitter died on 5 June 1981.

PROVENANCE: 
Commissioned by Zelia Hoffman, the sitter’s mother

EXHIBITED:

•The French Gallery, London, A Series of Portraits and Studies by Philip A. de László, M.V.O., June, 1924, no. 28 or 50

LITERATURE:

•DLA 1916 parcel, Moderne Welt, n˚16, ill.

•“To Be an Autumn Bride,” The Spur, 15 July 1924, p. 61, ill.

•The New York Times, Sunday, 23 November 1924, p. X10, ill. 

•Town & Country, Vol. 81, no. 3901, 1 December 1924, p. 68, ill.

KF 2017