3642

Mrs Edmund Buchanan, née Doreen Bury 1929

Standing three-quarter length, in three-quarter profile to the left, looking to the right, wearing a white sleeveless evening dress, a jade necklace, a thin stole draped across her shoulders, her right hand on the back of a chair, her left hand resting on her hip, a tall Chinese pot on a table behind on the left

Oil on canvas, 132 x 91.5 cm (52 x 36 in.)

Inscribed lower left: de László / 1929   

Laib L15581 (511) / C4 (16A)  

NPG 1929-31 Album, p. 4

Sitters’ Book II, opp. f. 64: Doreen M. Buchanan / Sept. 6th/29

Private Collection         

This portrait was chosen to illustrate the cover of the book A Brush with Grandeur^[1] as a striking statement of de László’s skills. The composition combines the daring vivacity of the 1920’s with the graceful strength of the best of European portraiture in previous centuries. Fluidity of brushwork is underpinned by stability of structure to make this one of the most brilliant portraits of de László’s career.        

De László had already painted a double portrait of Mrs Buchanan’s sisters-in-law, Misses Marjory and Elizabeth Buchanan, in 1923 [3637]. The present portrait was painted six years later. According to Mrs Buchanan’s son, his mother was inclined to tell people that she and de László had painted the picture together. Unusually, de László would not allow this sitter or her family to see the painting before it was finished, keeping it covered with a sheet between sittings. “One day,” he recalled, “when it was nearly finished he was called out of the room to the telephone, and [my mother] was alone for the first time with the picture and jumped up and ran over to look at it. She was aghast at how revealing the dress was and that one nipple was almost visible through the material. She knew my grandmother (who went as far as placing a large lampshade in front of the bare breasted woman in an 18th century tapestry for the sake of modesty) would be horrified. So she took her thumb and rubbed it on the still wet paint and blurred that bit. She said that Mr. de László never noticed, and her contribution remained!”

There exists in the same collection a charcoal drawing of the sitter [3649] done as a preparatory sketch for the present portrait. The artist also kept several preliminary pencil drawings in a sketchbook.        

Doreen Marguerite Bury was born in 1900 in British Columbia, where her father was practising as a barrister. Her younger years were spent at Downings, the family home in Northern Ireland, where she became an excellent horsewoman and developed a love of hunting. Soon after the death of her parents, she and her sister Esmée (who later married Sir Francis Lascelles) were forced to leave Ireland by the Republicans, who burnt their house to the ground. They went to live with cousins in Somerset, where the hunting was something of a consolation.

In 1926 she married Edmund Pullar Buchanan, a Captain in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, with whom she had three sons, Neil, Patrick and Nigel. From 1926-28 she and her husband were with the regiment in Egypt. The present portrait was painted on their return. In 1935-36 they were in India, but on the death of his father Edmund Buchanan retired from the army as a Major, and returned to run the family estate, Touch, in Stirlingshire.

In 1940 Touch was taken over as a hospital, and in June that year Edmund Buchanan was taken prisoner in northern France with the remnants of the Highland Division. Having moved to a smaller house nearby from where she ran the estate, Mrs. Buchanan started up a ‘Comforts Depot,’ raising money and provisions for 7th Argyll prisoners of war. Her husband was released in 1945 and demobilized as a full Colonel.

In 1958 she suffered a brain tumour that confined her to a wheelchair for the rest of her days. Despite this she still managed to enjoy life with her family and friends. Mrs. Buchanan died in 1986.

PROVENANCE:         

Charles A. Buchanan Esq.;

Colonel Edmund P. Buchanan;

Patrick Buchanan Esq., until his death in 1998

EXHIBITED:  

•Victoria Art Galleries, Dundee, Exhibition of recent Portraits and Studies by Philip A. de Laszlo, M.V.O., September 1932, nº 33

•Christie’s, King Street, London, A Brush with Grandeur, 6-22 January 2004, nº 119

LITERATURE:        

•DLA 1933 parcel, Compilation of Pesti Hírlap supplements, ill.

•Pesti Hírlap Vasárnapja, vol. 56, issue 8, 25 February 1934, p.51, ill.

•De Laszlo, Sandra,  ed., & Christopher Wentworth-Stanley, asst. ed., A Brush with Grandeur, Paul Holberton publishing, London 2004, pp. 182-83, ill.

•Hart-Davis, Duff, in collaboration with Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, De László: His Life and Art, Yale University Press, 2010, p. 214-215, ill. 115

•Hart-Davis, Duff, László Fülöp élete és festészete [Philip de László's Life and Painting], Corvina, Budapest, 2019, ill. 150

CWS 2008