11149

Irwin Boyle Laughlin 1912

Standing three-quarter length to the right, head turned and looking to the viewer, wearing a suit, a beige overcoat with matching gloves and hat, a blue silk tie with a pearl tie-pin and a gold signet ring on his right hand, his right arm holding a walking stick, his left arm resting on a lectern. A patterned curtain is visible in the left background.

Oil on canvas, 140 x 96.5 cm (55 x 38 in.)

Inscribed lower right: P. A. de László / LONDON / 1912. May.

Sitters’ Book I, f. 88: Irwin Laughlin. 26 February 1912

Meridian House, Washington, D.C.

De László painted the sitter’s wife [9969] in 1916 and their daughter, Gertrude [11153] in 1919, both portraits are also in the collection at Meridian House. A second portrait of Gertrude [9998] and one of the sitter’s son Alexander [9994], painted in 1919, are in a private collection.

The artist first met the sitter in Berlin in 1910 when he was painting the Imperial family [4952] and Laughlin was Secretary at the American Embassy. He recalled him as a bachelor, “who gave fine dinners.”^[1]

Irwin Boyle Laughlin was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 26 April 1871, the son of Pittsburgh steel baron George McCully Laughlin (1842-1908), a partner in the Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation. After graduating from Yale in 1893 he worked for his father for ten years before entering the diplomatic service. He served as Private Secretary to the US Minister to Japan (1903-05), second secretary of the American Legation in Tokyo (1905-1906), Secretary of Legation at Bangkok and Consul  General for Siam (1906-07) and Second Secretary of the Legation at Peking (1907); he was Second Secretary at St Petersburg (1907-08), Secretary of the Legation to Greece and Montenegro (1908-1909), Second Secretary in Paris (1909), Secretary of the Embassy in Berlin (1909-1912) and Secretary to the Embassy in London (1912-1919).

On 18 September 1912, he married Thérèse Eleanora Iselin daughter of New York banker Adrian Iselin, Jr.^[2] The couple’s first child, a daughter named Gertrude, was born in London in 1914. In a letter written to The Times later in life, Laughlin described the family’s life at Reigate Priory, the home of Lady Henry Somerset which they had rented during and immediately after the first world war: “I lived at Reigate Priory from 1917 through 1919, during a perilous time when, as Counsellor of the American Embassy, I was struggling against the common enemy and heard from the gardens of the Priory the sound of the guns in Flanders during the attack of March, 1918. A son [Alexander] was born to me there. The beauty and peacefulness of those surroundings helped me immeasurably to carry on through all the accumulated troubles of the last effort of the allies.”^[3]

Laughlin retired from the Diplomatic Service in 1919 and moved to Washington D.C. There he built Meridian House, designed by James Russell Pope at 1630 Crescent Place, a piece of land Laughlin had purchased in 1912. The home was filled with the Laughlins’ collection of 18th-century French drawings and Oriental porcelain and screens.

A letter from de László to C. Powell Minnigerode [111275], Director of the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., dated 17 December 1919 indicates Laughlin was instrumental in the organisation of the artist’s 1921 exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery: “Let me thank you most cordially for the very generous offer I received through Mr. Laughlin, to hold my exhibition at the beginning of 1920 in the Corcoran Gallery. I fully realize the importance of holding my Exhibition in the fine space you designed for it.”^[4]

Irwin Laughlin served as Henry Cabot Lodge’s secretary in Washington during the arms limitation conference (1921-22) and re-entered the diplomatic service in 1924, serving as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Greece until 1926 and later as Ambassador to Spain (1929-1933). He died on 18 April 1941 after a long illness.^[5]

PROVENANCE:

In the possession of the Laughlin family at Meridian House;

The Meridian International Centre

LITERATURE:

•László, Philip de, 1933-1934 diary, private collection, 1 January 1934 entry, p. 61

MD 2016