6982

Study portrait

Baroness Heinrich Schröder, née Baroness Helene Dorothée Schröder 1923

Study portrait, head and shoulders to the left, in three-quarter profile, wearing a pearl necklace and a hint of a blue gown

Oil on board, 75 x 56 cm (29 ½ x 22 in.)

Inscribed lower left in pencil: In memory of the 6th of Nov. 1923 / from your old friend / de László / Dell Park

Laib L11276 (451) / C24 (17): Schroder daughter [sic]

NPG 1923 Album, p. 57

Private Collection

Having painted Dorothée, together with her younger sister Marga, in 1908 [6984] and again in 1915 [6979], this third portrait of her was painted and presented to her by de László as a wedding present on the occasion of her marriage to her second cousin Baron Henry von Schröder (1885-1955) on 6 November 1923.

All three of de László’s portraits of Dorothée show her in three-quarter profile looking to the left, but it is perhaps no coincidence that the present work is notably most similar to the 1908 study in composition, lighting and gaze, thereby reminding the viewer and indeed the sitter of the long relationship between de László and the Schröder family. By the time he made the present portrait de László had painted around a dozen likenesses of members of Dorothée’s immediate family. He painted Henry Schröder in 1932 [7049].

For biographical notes on the sitters, see [6979]. Verso is a rejected portrait of an unidentified gentleman [112286].

CWS 2010