8835

Alice Barbi, Baroness Wolff von Stomersee 1901

Bust length, three-quarter profile to the left, wearing a black high-necked gown covered by a grey cape with elaborate stiffened collar and dark pearl earrings

Oil on canvas, 74 x 75 cm (29 x 29 ½ in.) oval

Sitters’ Book I, f. 26: Alice Barbi / de Wolff Stomersee [note by the artist: 1901. / Budapest Studio]

Private Collection

De László recalled his first meeting with Alice Barbi, an Italian-born singer and violinist, in Budapest, at the house of his good friend the renowned Hungarian violinist, Jenő Hubay: “I was so fascinated by her personality and her art that I asked her that very evening to allow me to make a study of her. I much enjoyed the hours while she was sitting for me, and I did one portrait for her, and one for myself, which I’m glad to say I still possess.” The latter is thought to be the present picture, painted early in 1901, showing the sitter as the artist had seen her perform during a rare return from retirement, “...in a simple black dress, with her calm and dignified manner, her beautiful dark eyes and deep black hair, apparently unconscious of her eager audience.”  In the eyes of the artist his sitter was the perfect example of a grande dame and one of the “few women who are blessed with great talent and great intelligence, and she had the typical Italian beauty and temperament.”^[1] 

Following her sittings for this portrait, she wrote the following quotation from Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting in the artist’s sitters’ book: “The good painter has to paint two principal things, that is to say, man and the intention of his mind. / That figure is most praiseworthy which best expresses through its actions the passion of the mind.”^[2] In 1903 de László made a third portrait of her in Vienna in the same period that he painted their mutual friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) [5847].

Alice Barbi was born into a family of musicians in Modena on 1 June 1858.^[3] Her early proficiency on the violin marked her as a prodigy and she received training from her father, Enrico, and later from Carlo Verardi. She also received a fully rounded education in music and languages. She travelled and performed abroad, accompanied by her father, and influential friends encouraged her career at home. In 1876 she became a member of the “First European Ladies’ Orchestra” with whom she gave her first solo-performance during a concert-tour in Sweden. She was also later a conductor of the all-female orchestra, the “Wiener Damenkapelle.”^[4] 

It was as a concert singer that Alice Barbi earned her international reputation. She had only started her singing education at the age of twenty-two and developed a fine mezzo-soprano voice with a good range and purity of tone, which she used with great agility. Her début took place in Milan on 2 April 1882 and was followed by concerts all over Italy. She first appeared in London on 24 June 1884, followed by performances in Russia, Germany and Vienna, in 1890, where Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) greatly admired her interpretation of his music.

A deep friendship developed between the singer and composer and it was Brahms who accompanied her at her farewell recital in Vienna in 1893, shortly before her marriage in 1894 to Baron Boris Wolff von Stomersee (1850–1917), a senior official at the Russian court of Tsar Nicholas II. Thereafter she divided her time with her husband and their two daughters, Alexandra and Olga, between Vienna, Budapest and their estate of Stomersee in Latvia.

At the outbreak of the Russian Revolution the family were in St Petersburg where soon afterwards the Baron died. Alice and her daughters succeeded in escaping on the last Red Cross convoy permitted to leave the city, en route to the port city of Riga.

In London, several years later, she met an old admirer, the Italian diplomat Pietro Tomasi Marchese della Torretta (1873–1962), whom she married in 1920. After the Marchese was dismissed by Mussolini as Italian Ambassador in London the couple moved to Rome. Alice died there on 4 September 1948.

PROVENANCE:

In the possession of the artist on his death;

Sold at auction at Sotheby’s, London, 22 July 1987, lot 75;

Sold at auction at Christie’s, London, 15 November 2012, lot 137

EXHIBITED:

•Hungarian Fine Art Society, Winter Exhibition (Tavaszi Kiállítás), Budapest, 1902/03 (this might also refer to [2789])

•Rome. Exposizione della Società degli Amatori, 1904, no. 1092

LITERATURE:

•Rutter, Owen, Portrait of a Painter, London, 1939, pp. 210, 220–221

•Hart-Davis, Duff, in collaboration with Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, De László: His Life and Art, Yale University Press, 2010, p. 87

•Hart-Davis, Duff, László Fülöp élete és festészete [Philip de László's Life and Painting], Corvina, Budapest, 2019, ill. 66

•DLA0113-0052, English press cutting, [undated, page unknown]

•DLA090-0243, newspaper article, Pester Lloyd, 16 November 1902, p. 5

ATG & CWS 2012