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María Silvina Lynch de Estrada, née María Silvina Lynch Muñoz 1930

Seated half-length, turned slightly to the right and looking left, wearing a blue silk stole over her green evening dress with lace-trimmed bodice, holding a fan in her right hand, her left hand raised to her breast.

Oil on canvas, 102 x 79cm (40 x 31in.)

Indistinctly inscribed lower right: de László / 1930

Sitters’ Book II, f. 66: Sylvina L.de Estrada/ Le 8 Octobre 1930 – Paris

Private Collection

By 1930, de László had already painted more than twenty-five portraits of Argentinian sitters. Sylvina Lynch de Estrada and her husband had first met the artist five years before they commissioned her portrait, “the first time we approached you, in the year 25, we were staying at the Savoy Hotel and you came to see us, but had to leave straight away to England.”^[1] They met again at his exhibition at the French Gallery, London, in the summer of 1929. In a letter from Karlsbad in August 1929 she confirms the commission of her portrait: “I have chosen the 800-guinea honorarium with hands and shoulders the same as the Queen of Greece [3270] I saw at the Master’s – would have preferred the three-quarter length but the fee is too high for me.”^[2] The portrait was completed in the artist’s studio in Paris, sessions recalled in a letter of 25 October 1930: “My husband and I, and also my daughter, have often thought of the precious moments we spent in your studio, thus enjoying your great artistic talent.”^[3]

Later in 1931, in a letter to the artist answering his question as to whether it was a suitable time for him to plan a visit to Argentina, she replied firmly in the negative on account of the country’s financial troubles. She expected to visit to Paris herself the following year and hoped he could paint a portrait of her husband and another of their daughter, wearing a Spanish mantilla, but these were never begun.^[4]

María Silvina (Sylvina) Lynch Videla Dorna was born in Buenos Aires on 24 August 1887, the ninth child and sixth daughter of Justiniano Lynch Zavaleta (1833-1881) and his wife Carmen Videla Dorna Muñoz Cabrera (1841-1912). On 20 April 1903 in Buenos Aires she married the lawyer, Tomás Eduardo Estrada Biedma (1874 -1936). They had four children: Caritina, Silvina (born 1904), Tomás Justiniano (born 1908) and Marcos (born c. 1912). In 1927 Dr. Tomás Estrada was appointed President of the Banco de la Nación Argentina.

Sylvina’s father was the third generation of his family to have been born in Buenos Aires. His great-grandfather, Patrick Lynch Blake^[5] was a member of a prominent Catholic family in Galway, Ireland and travelled to South America in the early eighteenth century.

Sylvina Lynch de Estrada died in Buenos Aires on 18 April 1971, thirty-five years after the death of her husband.

LITERATURE :

•DLA067-0032, letter from Sylvina Lynch de Estrada to Mr M. Roberts (de László’s assistant), 23 August 1929

•DLA067-0021, letter from Sylvina Lynch de Estrada to de László, 25 October 1930

•DLA067-0015, letter from Sylvina Lynch de Estrada to de László, 22 May 1931

SMdeL 2012