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María Mercedes de Alvear y Elortondo 1921

Seated three-quarter length slightly to the right on a blue upholstered armchair, looking full face to the viewer, her right arm along her body and her left hand on her lap, wearing a blue belted ivory silk gown with a chiffon stole round her and a bracelet on her right wrist

Oil on canvas, 122 x 91 cm (48 x 35 ¾ in)

Inscribed lower left: de László / Paris / XII

Sitters’ Book II, f. 26: Mercedes de Alvear [among other signatures dated November 1921]

Private Collection

The present portrait was commissioned by María Mercedes de Alvear’s parents, to hang in their palatial home a few miles outside Buenos Aires, close to the estuary of Río de la Plata. When Princess Marie Louise visited Argentina in 1930, she was shown their residence and her admiration for de László’s portrait was such that Sir John Millington-Drake,^[1] then Chargé d’Affaires at the British Embassy in Buenos Aires, wrote to the artist to convey her impression to him. He added: ‘May I say how very much I also admired it, having know its subject well. Fernando Alvear, the younger son whom I also knew well in those days told us that it was one of your own favourite portraits … It is certainly a wonderful and inspiring likeness of a girl of classic countenance and exceptional distinction.’^[2] 

De László completed María Mercedes de Alvear’s portrait in December 1921 in Paris, during a period of intense work. As his wife Lucy noted in her diary: ‘from Friday the 18th Nov: when P. arrived in Paris till yes[ter]day morning the 19th Dec. P. painted 8 pictures - ! …4 big canvases [including] Melle Alvear.’^[3] He painted most of his American and South American sitters in the French capital: it is significant that during his 1921 stay, three of the large canvases mentioned by Lucy de László were of Argentines.^[4] 

De László kept a studio in Paris at 31 rue Jean Goujon, but he also regularly painted in the duc de Guiche’s hôtel particulier at 42 bis Avenue Henri Martin. Armand de Guiche (later 12th Duc de Gramont), was one of his closest friends, and an artist himself. It is likely that de László used his studio in the winter of 1921, as Lucy recorded that Guiche organised a private exhibition of her husband’s new portraits at his home on Monday 19th December. She described the event as a ‘thundering success,’^[5] to which 130 people came.

De László, wishing to show María Mercedes’s portrait to a wider public, wrote to her father in May 1924, asking if he could have it on display at a small exhibition to be held at the Franz von Riel Salon in London. It would have been particularly appropriate, as the show was instigated by a cousin of María Mercedes, as explained in the Studio:^[6] ‘On the initiative of the art-loving wife of H.E. the President of the Republic, Doña Regina Pacini de Alvear,^[7] there has been opened, for charitable purposes, an exhibition of portraiture by contemporary masters which has many interesting features. Argentine families do not, as a rule, lend their pictures for public show, but the social success of the innovation has only been equalled by the artistic curiosity to see how men like László, Shannon, Dagnan-Bouveret, and Renoir, interpreted the Argentine grande dame. There were half-a-dozen László’s on the walls.’

However, Carlos María de Alvear replied that he could not lend the portrait of his daughter and expressed his surprise that de László had not requested it before for an earlier exhibition at Knoedler’s in Paris in 1922. He wrote: “its absence, I assure you, astonished many people who considered this portrait, as you have yourself just admitted it in your letter, as one of your most beautiful masterpieces,”^[8] suggesting that he took offence at that omission.

María de las Mercedes de Alvear y Elortondo was born in Buenos Aires on 25 March 1896, the youngest of nine children of Carlos María de Alvear y Fernández Coronel (1850-1928) and his wife Mercedes Elortondo Armstrong (1859-1940). She was named after her elder sister, María Mercedes, who had died in 1893, aged seven. The sitter’s father was grandson of the famous Argentine General Carlos María de Alvear,^[9] military hero of the Spanish American War of Independence and victor of the Battle of Ituzaingó in 1810. He was also first cousin of Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear,^[10] President of Argentina from 1922 to 1928. Carlos María de Alvear was a wealthy Argentine farmer with vast areas of land in the provinces of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe. As for Mercedes Elortondo, she was a member of a well-known aristocratic family from Buenos Aires but she grew up mostly in Paris where many Argentines used to spend the winter.

In 1911 the sitter’s father visited the International Fair in Paris with his two brothers-in-law, of the Errázuriz and Bosch families, and the three of them engaged the famous French architect, René Sargent^[11] to design for them  substantial family residences in Buenos Aires: the Palacio Errázuriz is now the Museum of Decorative Arts, the Palacio Bosch is the United States Embassy in Buenos Aires and the Alvear Palace, called Sans Souci, the largest of them all and taking four years to build, was opened with great celebration in 1918.^[12] 

María Mercedes de Alvear lost her reason a few years after she was painted by the artist, and never recovered. She died unmarried on 10 November 1962, aged sixty-six.

PROVENANCE:

Sold at auction at Christie’s King Street, 15 December 2010, lot 148

LITERATURE:

•Grange, Paulin, “Les Portraits de Philippe A. de László,” La Revue de l’art ancien et moderne, vol. XLII, no. 238, Paris, July-August 1922, p.137, ill. p. 144

•Blanco y Negro, 37th year, no.1876, Madrid, Sunday 1 May 1927, p. 26, ill.

•DLA050-0055, letter from Señor de Alvear to de László, 20 May 1924

•DLA095-0054, The Studio, vol. 88, October 1924

•DLA019-0041, letter from Sir John Millington-Drake to de László, 7 March 1930

SMdeL 2008