6631

Countess of Ancaster, née Eloise Lawrence Breese 1911

Seated full-length on a throne-like chair with carved wooden finials; facing the viewer, wearing a dark gown and a decorated fringed stole, her long string of pearls held in her left hand, her right arm resting on the arm of the chair

Oil on canvas, 174 x 118 cm (68 ½ x 46 ½ in.)

Inscribed upper right: P. A. László / 1911 / II

NPG Album, 1913-15, p. 33

Sitters’ Book I, f. 87: Eloise Ancaster / February 22nd 1911

Grimsthorpe and Drummond Castle Trust

A letter from Lady Ancaster^[1] in de László’s archive reveals that her portrait was already commissioned in April 1908. According to a descendant of the sitter, it was intended as a pendant to her husband’s portrait by Sir Arthur Stockdale Cope,^[2] to hang at Grimsthorpe Castle in one of the recently restored rooms there. At the time, Lady Ancaster had already expressed the wish not “to be painted in a modern dress but [a] draped dress.”^[3] The artist’s wife recorded in her 1908 diary that the first sitting took place on 27 April 1908: “Lady Willoughby de Eresby sat forenoon & afternoon today – first sittings. P. admires her v. much.”^[4] A number of subsequent sittings were mentioned in her diary, which suggests that the portrait was probably well advanced in 1908. However, it must have remained unfinished, as on 8 February 1910, Lady Ancaster wrote to the artist from Normanton Park, Stamford: “I wonder if there is any chance of your being able to continue with my portrait. Perhaps, it would be possible for you to come down here for a fortnight or ten days and so be able to finish it off.”^[5] The reason for such a delay remains unknown, and sittings, at de László’s London studio, did not resume until 1911.

As the artist’s method was to paint wet-on-wet, alla prima, he was always very reluctant to make alterations to his works, and preferred to start afresh on a new canvas. This may be a case in question, since between 11 April and 9 May 1911, the artist recorded no less than six sittings with Lady Ancaster,^[6] which is usually what he required for the completion of a three-quarter length portrait. De László’s warm palette and Lady Ancaster’s striking pose in her throne-like chair are clearly indebted to Joshua Reynolds’s Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse.^[7] Where Reynolds used these to theatrical effect, however, de László endowed his sitter with an air of aristocratic grandeur, strengthened by her direct gaze.

In The Studio magazine, Alfred Lys Baldry wrote of the portrait: “The manner of [de László’s] maturing is very plainly shown in a painting so striking and yet so finely restrained as his portrait of The Countess of Ancaster – a picture admirably designed and distinguished by notable decorative qualities, and yet marked by unusual intimacy of characterisation.”^[8] In her 1911 diary, Lucy de László recorded that Lord Ancaster paid £600^[9] for the picture.^[10]

Eloise Lawrence Breese was born in 1882, the eldest of the three children of William Lawrence Breese (1856-1888) of New York and his wife Marie Louise Parsons (1856-?).^[11] Following her father’s death, her mother remarried in 1894, to Henry Vincent Higgins, a well-known opera impresario, and moved to England with her children. Together with her sister Anne, Eloise entered the highest ranks of Anglo-American society. On 6 December 1905 at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, she married Gilbert Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby (1867-1951), 26th Baron Willoughby de Eresby, son of the Earl of Ancaster. There were four children of the marriage: Catherine Mary (born 1906), Gilbert James (born 1907),^[12] Priscilla (born 1909) and John (born 1914).

The couple settled at Normanton Park, near Stamford, in Rutland. They were given Grimsthorpe Castle by his father, which by then was hardly used^[13] and later inherited Drummond Castle, near Crieff. As their London home they rented the Earl of Minto’s [6334] house at 6 Audley Square for the term of his Viceroyalty in India (1905-1910). After 1910, Lady Ancaster set about modernizing and re-decorating Grimsthorpe, building new kitchens, bathrooms and staircases, and installing electricity and central heating before redecorating much of the house and adding further guest rooms. According to her granddaughter, she entertained at Grimsthorpe extensively and in style. She was also a keen tennis player, and had two courts at all her properties, including in London.

A contemporary American columnist wrote of the sitter in 1909: “Lady Willoughby d’Eresby just now is voted the loveliest young married woman in society...When she married…, she was not considered in the least pretty, being thin and angular, though her features were always good. But she has matured and developed, until now her lovely face is the envy of all her feminine friends. All the great artists as well as the obscure ones beg to be allowed to paint her and the photographers inundate her with invitations to pose to them. [She] is one of the American women who fight shy of notoriety…She has very high intellectual gifts; is a keen and shrewd politician, and has made a different man of her husband.”^[14]

The same columnist wrote later that year that she “has plenty of indications of a strong personality and many of the characteristics which go to make a hostess. It is not merely the smart set she favors; she is especially fond of the brainy element in her circle. Ambitious, too, she is cherishing the idea of starting a salon, and in everything she does strikes out a new line. She is one of the few really picturesque American women, and this is why she stands out and commands attention when others merely claim passing admiration. I think I can say without hesitation that I have never seen Lady Willoughby de Eresby conventionally dressed…She is an enthusiastic suffragette, and by her eloquence on the subject has converted several hardened anti-suffragists of her husband’s family to her way of thinking. No end of anonymous articles have been published by her in the interest of women voters, and she has considerable monetary interest in one of the organs devoted to the cause.”^[15] 

She was known for her sense of fashion. “She has no taste for ‘emotional’ gowns, which express somebody else’s opinion of what you might look like if you were another person; but she dresses with individual taste and adapts the prevailing fashions to her own requirements with rare artistic perception. Her dresses are always different from anybody else’s—and lend her that cachet of fashion which betrays their origin and design. She does not go to the ‘swagger’ dressmakers, Machinka, Paquin, Worth, and Bordin, but makes use of clever ‘small’ modistes who execute their own designs according to her own ideas.”^[16]

In 1916 the Ancasters purchased No. 19 Rutland Gate, which was known as Eresby House while they lived there, until 1931.^[17] Lady Ancaster was a Justice of the Peace for Kesteven, Lincolnshire and was awarded an OBE in 1920. Just before the Second World War she settled in Wardrobe Court in Old Richmond Palace in Twickenham.

Lady Ancaster died on 12 December 1953, surviving her husband by two years.

EXHIBITED:

•Agnew’s, Exhibition of Portraits by Philip A. László, M.V.O., May-June 1911, no. 18

LITERATURE:

•Baldry, A.L., “Some Recent Portraits by Philip A. László,’ The Studio, vol. LIII, no. 222, September 1911, p. 267, ill. p. 265

•The Nottingham Guardian, 17 May 1911

•Schleinitz, Otto von, Künstler Monographien, no. 106, Ph A. von László, Velhagen & Klasing, Bielefeld and Leipzig, 1913, p. 120

•The Ladies Field, vol. LXV, no. 836, Saturday 21 March 1914, front cover, ill.

•Wright, Helen, “Philip A. de László,” Art and Archaeology: The Arts Through the Ages, vol. XII, no. 6 (December, 1921), p. 241

•Country Life, vol. LV, no. 1423, Saturday 12 April 1924, front cover, ill.

•Rutter, Owen, Portrait of a Painter, London, 1939, p. 272

•Field, Katherine ed., Transcribed by Susan de Laszlo, The Diaries of Lucy de László Volume I: (1890-1913), de Laszlo Archive Trust, 2019, p. 126, ill. p. 111

•László, Lucy de, 1908 diary, private collection
•DLA085-0014, letter from Lady Ancaster to de László, 14 April 1908

•DLA085-0011, letter from Lady Ancaster to de László, 8 February 1910

•László, Philip de, Charles Letts’s 1911 pocket diary, private collection

•László, Lucy de, 1911 diary, private collection

Frame by Emile Remy, 153 King’s Road, London SW

MD 2013