10016

Study portrait

The Honourable Mrs Charles Rothschild, née Rózsika Edle von Wertheimstein 1914

Half-length to the left, full face to the viewer and looking slightly to the right, wearing a grey dress with a black stole suggested, a black wide-brimmed hat and a pearl necklace

Oil on board, 89 x 68.6 cm (35 x 27 in.)

Inscribed lower right: László F. E. / LONDON. 1914. XII   

Laib L7589(788) / C23(23)  The Hon. Mrs. Rothschild

Sitters’ Book I, opp. f. 101: Rozsika Rothschild Dec. 2d 1914

The Rothschild Archive

This portrait was painted during the early months of the First World War. Correspondence between de László and Rózsika shows there was some difficulty in arranging the sittings and they took place at the beginning of December 1914. She wrote  “Bad luck seems to hang over the days on which I would like to sit for you … I  shall be back in London again on 1st December, and on that day and also on the 2nd and 3rd I could come to the studio at any time…Please let me know whether you can arrange the sittings for December; I should be glad if it is possible,  because if you do not paint me now, this war if it lasts for long will break me.”^[1]

The portrait was commissioned as a gift for the sitter’s husband Charles, who approved of it: “My husband was very pleased with the surprise and he thinks my portrait is very good; and I too am very pleased! Although I can really say that I am so depressed about the events of recent weeks that I can hardly manage to feel happy about anything. Please let me know how much I owe you!  Laib^[2] sent me a very good copy,  and I ordered two dozen so that I should be able to send them home when times are better.”^[3]

The sitter was born on 15 October 1870, the daughter of Rittmeister^[4] Alfred von Wertheimstein (1843-1918), of Nagyvárad, (now Oradea, Romania), and his wife Maria Grosz. The Wertheimsteins were an old but impoverished Hungarian Jewish family. Rózsika “possessed beauty and athleticism (she was Hungarian ladies’ tennis champion and was the first woman to perfect the overarm serve). She also possessed a brilliant intelligence which impressed all who met her. And she was extremely capable.”^[5] She also spoke five languages and was an avid reader of books and newspapers in each.

In 1906 Rózsika met Nathaniel Charles Rothschild (1877-1923), younger son of Nathan Mayer, 1st Baron Rothschild, while he was indulging his passion for lepidoptery in the Carpathians.^[6] “She was seven years older than Charles and strong-willed, a perfect support for a man bowed down by anxieties and poor health.”^[7] On 6 February 1907 they married. There were four children of the marriage: Miriam (born 1908), who became a famous zoologist, entomologist and author, Elizabeth (born 1909), Nathaniel Mayer Victor (born 1910), who became 3rd Baron Rothschild on the death of his bachelor uncle Walter in 1937, and Kathleen (born 1913).

In the summer of 1914 Rózsika and Charles were visiting her uncles in Nagyvárad with their two eldest daughters when a telegram arrived from Charles’ father calling them back to England. Their journey, partly on foot, took a week and they arrived in Dover only hours before the outbreak of war. The present portrait was painted four months later.

In February 1915 it was Rózsika who broke the news to Lucy de László that she had had word from her sister in Vienna that the artist’s mother had died. It was dangerous for the artist to be in touch with his family in Hungary and in his shock, not having heard that she was ill, he telegrammed Adriana van Riemsdijk^[8] [110706] to send a wire to his brother Marczi asking to meet him in Amsterdam. This communication resulted in a visit from a policeman the next morning and would later be used as evidence against him in his internment trial.^[9]

Unlike Charles, an assimilationist, Rozsika was an enthusiastic Zionist. She was introduced to Chaim Weizmann in July 1915. Through her, Weizmann met a wide range of influential figures, including Lady Crewe, Lord Robert Cecil (Undersecretary at the Foreign Office), and General Allenby, later the “liberator” of Jerusalem.^[10]

The 1st Baron Rothschild died in March 1915 and, after a row with his uncles, Charles became senior partner of the family bank, N. M. Rothschild & Sons. By the end of 1916, however, his health had collapsed and he left for Switzerland, leaving his wife (technically an enemy alien like de László) and children in England. He returned in 1918 but succumbed to Spanish Influenza which, though he survived, left him with encephalitis, adding to his psychological problems. In 1923 he took his own life. Thereafter Rózsika took on more and more family responsibilities, including running three houses and the Rothschild estate at Tring, looking after her increasingly frail brother-in-law and her ageing deaf mother-in-law.  

She died on 30 June 1940.

PROVENANCE:

Gifted to the Trustees of The Rothschild Archive by the estate of the late Dame Miriam Rothschild

EXHIBITED:

•Jewish Museum Vienna, The Vienna Rothschilds: A Thriller, 8 December 2021 - 5 June 2022

LITERATURE:

•Rutter, Owen, Portrait of a Painter, London, 1938, p. 300

•Ferguson, Niall. The House of Rothschild: The World’s Banker, New York, 1999, vol. II, p. 450

•The Rothschild Archive, Review of the Year 2009-2010, London, 2010, p. 10

•Livingstone, Natalie, “The Women Behind the Balfour Declaration”, The Wall Street Journal (online), 13 October 2022, ill.

•DLA068-0025, letter from Rózsika Rothschild to de László, 16 November 1914

•DLA068-0024, letter from Rózsika Rothschild to de László, 20 December 1914

CWS & KF 2013