10936

Academic work

Female Nude 1891

Standing full-length in a studio interior, seen from behind

Oil on canvas, 77.5 x 48 cm (30 ½ x 18 ⅞ in.)

Inscribed lower right: László / Paris / 1891  V

Laib L5510 (812) / C31 (8)  Study                  

Studio Inventory, p. 14 (81): Study of the back of a Nude Figure. An early study. Painted in Paris.

Private Collection

A life study from de László’s time at the Académie Julian in Paris. In de László’s own words: “The Académie Julian was an old building, in the pre-Revolutionary style: square and sombre, without any artistic or architectural beauty – and a great lack of cleanliness… In the studio we were given six mornings to make studies of a given size. I think this an excellent idea. The student was obliged to see and to understand the whole body, not only from the point of view of character or colour, but of movement also… It is vital that the student should understand the following principles: first to know the construction of everything in nature; only then is it possible for him, if he have a real vocation for art, to reduce what he sees to its relative importance, and to create, either in drawing or in painting, the expression of movement and colour values which is the spiritual part of art. All this I began to realise for the first time during my student days in Paris.”^[1] According to von Schleinitz, de László won a prize for this study.^[2]

PROVENANCE:           

In the possession of the artist on his death

EXHIBITED:         

•Christie’s, King Street, London, A Brush with Grandeur, 6-22 January 2004, no. 4

LITERATURE:        

•Schleinitz, Otto (von), Künstler Monographien, no. 106, Ph A. von László, Bielefeld and Leipzig (Velhagen & Klasing), 1913, p. 10 ill. p. 11

•Rutter, Owen,  Portrait of a Painter, London, 1939, pp. 63-71

•De Laszlo, Sandra, ed., & Christopher Wentworth-Stanley, asst. ed., A Brush with Grandeur, Paul Holberton publishing, London, 2004, p. 70, ill.

CWS 2008