110639

Study portrait

Catharina Francken-Meertens  1920

Head-and-shoulders to the left, head turned slightly to viewer, wearing a white chiffon stole, a pearl necklace and pearl earrings

Oil on board, 73 x 48.5 cm (28 ¾ x 19 in.)

Inscribed lower right: de László / 1920. Amsterdam [pencil]

Sitters’ Book II, opp. f. 15: C. Francken. May 18th 1920.

Private Collection

Thanks to the efforts of Barthold van Riemsdijk [111222], in April and May 1920 de László exhibited at the Spring Exhibition of the Ars & Amicitiae artists’ association. De László arrived in Amsterdam at the beginning of May and later that month he found himself short of change in an artists’ supplies shop. A fellow customer kindly offered to buy the materials for him. This man was Jan Francken, who was also a painter and a great admirer of de László’s work. Mr Francken invited de László to his home for refreshments, and in return for such kindness and hospitality, de László made this study in oils of Mr Francken’s wife Catharina. A note in the diary of the artist’s wife suggests that he went to Amsterdam in September of the same year “where he is engaged to paint Mrs Franken [sic] – a complimentary sketch.”^[1]

Other portraits resulted from the encounter in the shop, although presumably not all free of charge: a more formal portrait of Mrs Francken [110667], a group portrait of the Franckens’ three children [8952], and a drawing of their daughter Maggy [110638].

Catharina Mathilde Abramine, known as ‘Toos’, was born on Batavia (now Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies on 2 January 1876, the eldest of nine children of Hendrik Jacobus Meertens (1847-1905) and his wife C.M.J. Buyn (born 1855). Both her parents had been born in Batavia. She married Jan Willem Dirk Francken in Batavia on 30 March 1898; her husband was born in Soerabaja (now Surabaya), the capital of East Java Province, in 1872, the son of Henri Francken and Mathilda Verbeek. He was a lawyer and attorney and from 1926 became director of Cultuurmaatschappijen in Nederlands Indie (Dutch Indies Cultivation Companies). The sitter, Toos, died in 1951 and her husband Jan died in Brussels in 1964.

PROVENANCE: 

The sitter’s daughter, Mathilde Marguerite McLaren, née Francken;

Bequeathed to the present owner

EXHIBITED:        

•Museum Van Loon, Amsterdam, De László in Holland, Dutch Masterpieces by Philip Alexius de László (1869-1937), 3 March-5 June 2006, no. 33  

LITERATURE:

•Grever, Tonko and Annemieke Heuft (Sandra de Laszlo, British ed.), De László in Holland: Dutch Masterpieces by Philip Alexius de László (1869-1937), Paul Holberton publishing, London, 2006, pp. 10, 62, 63, 69, ill. no. 33

•László, Lucy de, 1920 diary, private collection, 28 August entry, pp. 238-239 

CWS 2006