4239

Countess Ferdinandine Széchényi 1927

Seated three-quarter length to the left on blue and gold brocade, full face and looking to the viewer, wearing a white dress with pink bows on the shoulders, holding a doll dressed in blue in her right arm and her left hand resting on the stool, all against a dark background

Oil on canvas, 85 x 61.5 cm (33 ½ x 24 ¼ in.)

Inscribed lower right: de László / LONDON. 1927

Sitters’ Book II, f. 54: Nandine Széchényi / June 1927 

Private Collection

De László first met the Széchényi family in 1921, when he painted the sitter’s mother née Gladys Vanderbilt [4238]. The family frequently visited London during Count Széchényi’s tenure as Hungarian Minister to the United States in Washington, D.C. and the portrait was painted at de László’s studio at 3 Fitzjohn’s Avenue in June 1927. The artist stayed with the family at their home in New York in December 1931 when he painted a study portrait of the Count [4236] in Hungarian dismagyar and his daughter Sylvia in riding habit [4244].

In later life, Countess Ferdinandine recalled posing for de László as being a “war going on between us, I remember being naughty and hating the doll I had to hold and chocolates in a wooden box wherewith to bribe me.”^[1] Both her mother and her nurse were also in attendance to entertain her.

Countess Ferdinandine ‘Nandine’ Széchényi, born 7 February 1923 in Washington, D.C., the youngest of five daughters of Count László Széchényi (1879-1938) and his wife Gladys Moore Vanderbilt (1886-1965). She was educated at the Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia. She married 26 May 1946 in Washington, D.C., Count Alexander E. Eltz (1911-1977) of Vienna. There were two sons of the marriage: Peter (born 1948) and Nicholas (birth date unknown). They lived in Salzburg, where her husband died in 1977. She continued to reside there and taught German and Hungarian until her death in 1998.

EXHIBITED:

•Newport Art Museum, The Cornelius Vanderbilts of The Breakers: A Family Retrospective, 27 May - 1 October 1995, no. 327

LITERATURE:

•Allen, Armin Brand, The Cornelius Vanderbilts of The Breakers: A Family Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), The Preservation Society of Newport County, 1995, p. 117, ill.

KF 2018