2063

Maisie Wood 1919

Head-and-shoulders to the right, full face to the viewer, wearing a pale pink dress just indicated and wearing a pink bow in her hair, and a silver necklace

Oil on canvas, 45.5 x 35.5 cm (17 ⅞ x 13 ⅞ in.)

Inscribed lower right: de László / 1919 XI

Laib L9754 (656) / C29 (18): For Mrs. Wood

NPG 1917-21 Album, f. 98

Sitters’ Book II, f. 12: 1919. XI. Maisie Wood

Private Collection

After two years of internment and forced inactivity, in the six months following his exoneration and release in June 1919 de László painted some twenty portraits. These included, in December 1919, the present portrait of nine-year-old Maisie Wood, and one of her father [111034]. The two portraits, being close in size can be considered as pendants and are fine examples of de László’s technique of painting at speed, wet on wet, with almost no colour mixing on his palette. In this fashion he could achieve an excellent and vivacious likeness of his sitter in a matter of a few hours.

Marie Therese Wood, known as Maisie, was born in Vienna on 9 May 1910, the daughter of Captain George Jervis Wood and his Hungarian wife Rózsa, née Baroness Lónyay. Her father had been the Military Attaché at the British Embassy in Vienna before the First World War and returned again afterwards. On 25 May 1936 Maisie married Fürst Ernst Hohenberg (1904–1954), the second son of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este, who had been murdered with his wife at Sarajevo in 1914. They had two sons, Ferdinand and Ernst. She died at Schloss Radmer in Styria on 28 November 1985.

Maisie’s mother was painted in London in 1916 [10079].

EXHIBITED:        

•The French Gallery, London, A Series of Portraits and Studies By Philip A. de

László, M.V.O., June 1923, n° 64

CWS 2013