111438

Study portrait

Henry Molyneux Paget Howard, 19th Earl of Suffolk 1913

Oil on board, 89 x 69.9 cm (35 x 27 ½ in.)

Inscribed lower left: P. A. de László / 1913 XII

Sitters’ Book I, f. 94: Suffolk. Dec 20th 1913.

Private Collection

This study portrait was completed at the end of December 1913, in time for it to be presented to the Countess of Suffolk as a Christmas present. A letter from the Earl of Suffolk to de László suggests that it was then returned to the studio to be photographed.

Henry ‘Barts’ Molyneux Paget Howard was born 13 September 1877, the son of Henry Charles Howard, 18th Earl of Suffolk and 11th Earl of Berkshire (1833-1898) and his wife Mary Eleanor Lauderdale Coventry. He was educated at Winchester, and succeeded to his father’s titles in 1898. On 26 December 1904, he married Margaret Hyde Leiter, the daughter of Levi Zeigler Leiter of Chicago and Washington DC and also the sister-in-law of Lord Curzon [3890]. There were three sons of the marriage: Charles Henry  (born 1906), Cecil John (born 1908) and Greville Reginald (born 1909).

Howard was ADC to Lord Curzon during his term as Viceroy of India (1898-1905). He commissioned as a Major in the 3rd Wessex Brigade, Royal Field Artillery in 1908. They were posted to India at the start of the First World War before participating in the Mesopotamia campaign. He was killed in action 21 April 1917 at the Battle of Istabulat during the First World War, aged forty. He is buried at Basra War Cemetery, Iraq.

LITERATURE:

•Owen Rutter, Portrait of a Painter, London, 1939, p. 282

•DLA048-0012, letter from Suffolk to de László, 14 January 1914

KF 2017