4162

Princess Indira Devi, The Maharani of Cooch Behar 1935

Half-length to the right, full-face, wearing a green sari and double pearl drop earrings

Oil on board, 91.5 x 71 cm (36 x 28 in.)

Inscribed lower right: de László / 1935 Oct / London

Sitters’ Book II, opp. f. 85: Indira Devi 3-10-1935

Private Collection

De László first painted the Maharani in 1925, which portrait remains in a private collection in America [4159]. The artist’s correspondence suggests that a third portrait of the Maharani may have been painted c. 1927,^[1] but remains untraced, see [4159]. It is thought that the present painting is that which is mentioned in Indira Devi’s daughter Gayatri’s book A Princess Remembers,^[2] although it is described there as a full-length painting.

In July 1935, de László painted the Maharajah of Jaipur [5810], who was accompanied on two of his sittings by his close friend, the Maharani of Cooch Behar. “She is still beautiful & graceful,” the artist wrote in his diary, “in the autumn I must do a study of her – I love Their deep – colours – & deep – Eyes.”^[3] The Maharani sat for him on 1 October 1935 and the study was finished in a second sitting on 3 October.^[4] On 16 October the artist and his wife dined with the Maharani at her London flat, where they saw the present portrait hanging above the fireplace.^[5]

Authoress Lucy Moore attributes the painted features of the present painting with personality and meaning; she refers to the “enigmatic eyes” that “seem to encompass all the joy and heartbreak in the world.”^[6] This would seem to suggest that de László captured the sitter’s character with his brush; however, a differing view emerges from Indira Devi’s daughter, who believed that no artist was ever able to capture her mother’s true energy and “electric vitality.”^[7] When Indira Devi died, Gayatri commented upon de László’s portrait: “That was Ma at the moment when the whole world seem[ed] to be her domain and when all men were in love with her and when she would – any minute now – smile her famous smile and make one of her unexpected remarks, outrageous or infinitely kind.”^[8]

For biographical notes on the sitter, see [4159].

PROVENANCE:         

By descent in the family

EXHIBITED:

•Dundee City Art Gallery, 1934

LITERATURE:

•László, Philip de, June-November 1935 diary, private collection, 29 July 1935 entry, p. 65-66; 1 October 1935 entry, p. 119; 3 October entry, p. 121; 16 October entry, pp. 132-3

•Devi, Gayatri and Santha Rama Rau, A Princess Remembers, Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1976, p. 306

•Moore, Lucy, Maharanis: The Lives and Times of Three Generations of Indian Princesses, Penguin/Viking, 2004, pp. 189, 275, ill. pl. 31 between pp. 224-25

CC 2008