7045

Portrait drawing

Baroness Alexander von Schröder 1911

Head and shoulders in profile to the left, three-quarter face, wearing her hair up and with a bandeau

Charcoal on white paper, 72 x 53 cm (28 ¼ x 20 ¾ in.)

Indistinctly inscribed lower right in pencil: P. A. László / Berlin 1911 . III 

Inscribed lower left: Frau v. Schröder 

Sitters’ Book I, opp. f. 85: Katharine von Schröder 14.3.1911 / geb. Hatch

Private Collection

In March 1911 de László painted a portrait of Baron Alexander von Schröder [11380], a month after he had painted his first portrait of Baron Bruno Schröder, Alexander’s first cousin [6945]. At the same time he made the present drawing of Alexander’s American wife, Katherine.

In a letter of 9 April 1911, while complimenting de László on the portrait of her husband, Katherine wrote from Paris, where that portrait was being exhibited at the Salon: “As we are coming to London I have sent the drawing you made of me and will beg you to make some changes. It was done in such haste – rather against your will – that most people really ask who it is? I told you at the time you were making me unnecessarily beautiful.”^[1] The drawing apparently remained with the artist because the sitter was not happy with it and de László was unwilling to make alterations. It is possible that he made a fresh start but a second drawing, like the portrait of Alexander, remains untraced.

Katherine Hatch was born in New York on 8 February 1873, the daughter of Albert Gallatin Hatch of Buffalo (1842-1919) and his wife Charlotte, née Spicer. Her mother died when Katherine was barely a year old, probably as a result of complications arising from the birth of her second daughter, Anna. In 1899 her father remarried, to Kate Smith (1862-1945).

On 1 January 1891 Katherine married, in Newton, Middlesex, Mass., George Webber Cutter of Cincinnati, but the marriage with a man thirty years her senior ended in divorce. She married again in Hamburg, on 28 December 1901, Baron Alexander von Schröder (1870-1918). She had no children and died in Berlin on 17 March 1918, aged forty-five, twelve days before her husband.

The drawing had been previously identified by a member of the Schröder family as showing Alexander Schröder’s niece, Baroness Marion Janet Schröder (1886-1954), but subsequent research has shown this to be incorrect.

LITERATURE:        

•DLA066-0065, letter from Katherine von Schröder to de László, 9 April 1911

CWS 2008