5353

Mrs Arthur Graham Glasgow, née Margaret Branch 1910

Standing full-length to the left, full-face looking to the viewer, wearing a long pink evening gown with a train draped around her feet, a black chiffon stole round her shoulders, tiara and pearl necklace and a bracelet on her left wrist which is raised to her breast, holding a sprig of flowers in her left hand; a framed portrait on the wall behind

Oil on canvas, 235.6 x 122 cm (92 ¾ x 48 in.)

Inscribed, top left: P. A. László. 1910. V.

Laib L4635 (882) / C9 (6): Mrs. Glasgow

NPG 1903-14 Album, p. 22

NPG 1907-13 Album, p. 23

Sitters’ Book I, f. 84: Margaret Glasgow. March 7th 1910

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

This portrait was painted in 1910, a year of distinguished commissions for de László. It was completed after the artist returned from painting King Alfonso XIII of Spain [7925] and Queen Eugénia [7933] in Madrid. That same year he was asked by the Italian government to present his self portrait [9724] for the Vasari Corridor at the Uffizi, where it joined those of great artists of the past, including Titian and Van Dyck.

The sitter signed the artist’s Sitters’ Book on 7 March, which suggests the portrait was begun that day. Lucy de László, the artist’s wife, notes in her diary on 13 May, and again on 8 June, that he put aside the composition and began again. The unfinished three-quarter length portrait was left in de László’s studio until his death [112576]. Four preparatory studies that were also recorded in the Studio Inventory show that he considered painting the portrait as a seated full-length [112414], while there are also two full length [112390][112499] and one head and shoulder study [112389]. The present portrait was completed by 8 June, when the artist received a cheque for £630.[1] 

Mrs Glasgow was interviewed by the Sketch at de László’s 1929 French Gallery exhibition and related the circumstances of the commission: “Mrs Glasgow, as chic and vivacious as ever, was telling me that nearly eighteen years ago, when Laszlo wanted to paint a blonde, a brunette, and a Titian-haired beauty, Mme. Edwardes [5137] sat for the dark lady, and Mrs Glasgow was the rousse. Laszlo, she said, was so determined to get a perfect likeness that he did six pictures before he was satisfied!”[2]   

The picture was admired by Oakley Williams in Selections from the Work of P.A. de László published in 1921: “In a woman of Mrs. Glasgow’s keen and trained appreciation of an artist’s task, Laszlo found a sitter with whom he was at once in complete sympathy … Both in colour harmony and in composition Laszlo’s portrait of Mrs. Glasgow is one of his most attractive and masterly studies of contemporary womanhood.”[3] 

The artist painted a half-length portrait of the sitter’s daughter Marjorie in 1920 [5356], a photographic copy of which is on display at her former home, Mount Congreve, Co. Waterford. The sitter's sister-in-law, Mrs John Kerr Branch, née Beulah Gould was painted in 1924 [2524] and her brother John Kerr Branch in 1930 [2523].

 

Margaret Branch was born on 4 October 1876, the daughter of John Patterson Branch (1830-1915), President of the Merchants National Bank in Richmond, Virginia, and his wife Mary Louise Merritt (1830-1896). Before her marriage she travelled extensively in Europe and spent time in Munich, where she counted the artists Franz von Lenbach[4] and Franz von Stück amongst her friends and admirers. She was painted by Lenbach, aged sixteen, and Williams described it as “one of the great master’s studies of beautiful girlhood.”[5]

In 1901 she married Arthur Graham Glasgow (1865-1955), a civil engineer and founder of Humphreys and Glasgow Ltd., a company that designed and built chemical plants. Their only child Marjorie was born in 1903. The sitter was presented at the Court of St James’s on 8 May 1903 and became one of the most prominent Anglo-American hostesses of the Edwardian period. The couple leased a house from Lord Northcliffe in Berkeley Square from 1907, the same year she was introduced to King Edward VII at Marienbad. She subsequently entertained him at their London home, where her  hospitality was, “not confined only to representatives of rank and fashion” but extended “to foreign visitors who won distinction in the cosmopolitan society of art and letters.”[6] 

From 1922 the couple lived at Moncorvo House in Ennismore Gardens, London, now demolished. After Arthur Glasgow’s retirement in 1939, they moved to Palm Beach, Florida.

 

The couple created trusts to benefit the Virginia Museum of Fine Art and a number of other charitable institutions. In recognition, the museum bestowed their Rhoads Medal upon the sitter.[7] The sitter died on 24 August 1952 in Palm Beach, Florida, after a long illness.

PROVENANCE:          

Bequeathed to the Virginia Museum of Fine Art by Arthur Graham Glasgow in 1956

EXHIBITED:                  

•Dowdeswell Galleries, London, 1911, to be confirmed

LITERATURE:          

•Vita d’Arte, fourth year, volume VII, n˚ 39, March 1911, Siena: L. Lazzeri, 1911, pp. 104-8, ill.

•DLA 1911 bundle, The Onlooker, 6 May 1911, ill.

•Museum: Revista Mensual de Arte Español Antiguo y Moderno y de la Vida Artistica Contemporanea, 3rd year, number 8, 1913, p. 300, ill.

•Williams, Oakley, ed., Selections from the Work of P.A. de László, foreword by comte Robert de Montesquiou, Hutchinson, London, 1921, pp. 105-8, ill. facing p. 104

•Field, Katherine ed., Transcribed by Susan de Laszlo, The Diaries of Lucy de László Volume I: (1890-1913), de Laszlo Archive Trust, 2019, p. 127, ill. p. 136

•Field, Katherine, with essays by Sandra de Laszlo and Richard Ormond, Philip de László: Master of Elegance,

Blackmore, 2024, ill. p. 34                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

•László, Lucy de, 1910 diary, private collection

CC & MD 2013

KF 2023

[1] The equivalent of approximately £49,200 in 2023.

[2] DLA108-0045, op cit.

[3] Williams, op. cit., pp. 105-6.

[4] Franz Seraph von Lenbach (1836-1904) was a very successful portrait and figure painter of the Munich school who modelled himself on the Italian late Renaissance masters, after completing his studies in Rome as a young man. He was the pre-eminent painter in Munich at the time that de László was studying at the Academy there, in 1891.

[5] Williams, op. cit., p.105

[6] Ibid., p.105

[7] Named for Webster S. Rhoads, an early supporter of the museum.