12034

Mrs John Taylor, née Hélène de Csanády, later Mrs Charles Hill and then Mrs Kenneth Kemble 1935

Half-length, looking to the left, wearing a chemise and a stole round her shoulders

Oil on canvas, 82.5 x 65 cm (32 ½ x 25 ½ in.)

Inscribed lower left: de László 1935   

Laib L19471(606) / C26(32) Mrs. Taylor

NPG Album1935, p. 9

Sitters’ Book II, opp. f. 81: Hélene Taylor / May 21st [among signatures dated 1935]

Private Collection

De László completed this picture over the course of four sittings in May 1935. The sitter initially arrived at the artist’s studio in a Norman Hartnell dress. However, the artist had very firm views about costume and insisted that she sat to him wearing her slip, wrapped in a silk stole. In this way de László felt the viewer’s gaze was drawn to the face and hands rather than to incidental details of clothing. His first impressions of the sitter were favorable and his diary records that she had “good features…an interesting face to paint.”^[1] By the time he finished the portrait on 24 May he seems to have struggled with the sitter’s inability to complete the sittings, remarking, “how different for me if I have an intelligent – graceful sitter – who is not conscious of himself [sic] – the whole time!”^[2]

Hélène Charlotte de Csanády was born on 30 October 1908, the daughter of Hungarian-born Maria Magdalena de Csanády (born 1890) and Charles de Berquely. Her mother married Franklin T. Grant Richards (1872-1948) in 1915, who became her adoptive father. He attended the portrait sitting of 22 May, “her – mon[o]cled step father came – to see the progress – & very oily – hypocritic[al] gentleman – of good looks!”^[3] 

Little is known of her early life but she was educated at Roedean and St. Mary’s School, Ascot, and regularly visited her maternal grandmother Ilona Dreschler at the family summer home in Monte Carlo. She was an acknowledged sportswoman and pioneered alpine skiing and waterskiing as pursuits for women.

Hélène married William John Taylor (1905-1994) at St. George’s, Hanover Square, in 1928. He was capped for England as a rugby player five times that year, winning the Five-Nations Grand Slam. He then focused on a career in business having previously read law at Trinity College, Cambridge. They had two children, Peter (born 1930) and Hélène Fleur (born 1933); however the marriage was in difficulties early on and finally dissolved in 1941.

The family home throughout the 1930s had been a house on the Moor Park estate, near Farnham in Surrey, but this was requisitioned by the Canadian Army in 1940 and Hélène departed for the US that same year with her two children and three of their cousins. They travelled on to British Columbia, escorting thirty evacuated girls from Fritham House in the New Forest, a private school run by Sir Timothy Eden Bt., brother of the future Prime Minister.

Hélène was deeply involved with the war effort in North America, aiding the ambulance service, establishing tea vans, and latterly running a seaman’s club for distressed and wounded sailors from the Battle of the Atlantic. She met her second husband during her time in Canada and married Charles Loraine Hill (1891 -1976), a ship owner, in 1944.

She married thirdly Commander Theodore Kenneth Kemble (1907-1991) in 1981, whom she had known since she was a young girl. This was also his third marriage. Hélène died in April 2004 at the age of ninety-five.

LITERATURE:

•László, Philip de, 1935 diary, private collection

KF 2012