4893

DESTROYED

Elie de Rothschild 1922

Half-length full face to the viewer, dressed as a drummer boy in an open necked full white shirt and a hat; a drum held by shoulder straps at his waist and holding a drumstick in each hand

Oil [support and measurements unknown]

Sitters’ Book II, f. 32: élie de rothschild [below his mother Nelly’s signature dated 30 November 1922]

De László painted the sitter’s mother in 1913 [4623], for which he made a preparatory study [112191], and 1922 [4625], and his sister Cécile [110592] at an unknown date. The portrait was destroyed during the Second World War, when the family house near Paris, La Versine, was hit by a bomb. The picture was exhibited at the 1924 French Gallery exhibition with those of his sister and mother.

Elie de Rothschild was born on 29 May 1917, the youngest son of Baron Robert de Rothschild and his wife Nelly Beer. He married in 1942 Liliane Fould-Springer (1916-2003), youngest of four children of Baron Eugène Fould-Springer and his wife Mitzi, the pair having known each other since childhood. The marriage took place by proxy as Baron Elie was at the time a prisoner of war at Colditz Castle, from where he had written to Liliane with his proposal.

After the war, Elie, his elder brother Alain and their wives shared the house at 23 Avenue de Marigny, Paris, where the brothers had grown up. The house, set in several acres of gardens a few yards away from the Elysée Palace, had been built by their grandfather, Baron Gustave de Rothschild, in 1885. Harold Acton visited the house after the war and recalled how white-gloved footmen served the meals on “perfect Sèvres with a separate vintage wine to accompany each course.”^[1] Another frequent visitor, in the 1960s, was Cecil Beaton, who enjoyed the Rothschilds’ hospitality while in Paris working for French Vogue. In the late 1950s they moved into 11 Rue Masseran, a Paris hotel built for Prince Masserano by Brongniart in 1785. Baron Elie and his wife also kept a house in London, near the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, where they spent much of their later life.

The sitter’s primary occupations were as partner in the family bank de Rothschild Frères and the running of Château Lafite-Rothschild, the premier cru Pauillac vineyard in the Médoc. He was also a respected collector of fine and decorative art, possessing works by Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Dubuffet and Picasso.

Baron Elie died of a heart attack on 6 August 2007, at his hunting lodge in the Austrian Alps, having survived his wife by four years.

EXHIBITED:

The French Gallery, London, A Series of Portraits and Studies By Philip A. de László, M.V.O., June, 1924, no 36

KF 2013