11801

Antoine XII-Armand, duc de Guiche 1902

Head and shoulders, slightly to the left and full-face, wearing a dark coat, deep maroon waistcoat, white shirt and full white cravat, a handkerchief in his pocket

Oil on canvas, 73x 56 cm (28 ⅝ x 22 in.)

Inscribed top left: László F.E.

Sitters’ Book I, opp. f. 60: Armand de Gramont, duc de Guiche [together with other signatures dated 1902]

Private Collection

This is the first of seven portraits de László made of the sitter, who would become one of the artist’s closest friends and supporters. It was originally part of one of the two large group portraits the sitter’s father Agénor, 11th duc de Gramont commissioned de László to paint in 1902 for Vallière, the château he had just built in Mortefontaine. In 1929, four years after succeeding his father as 12th duc de Gramont, the sitter asked de László to cut down the two large canvases into six individual portraits, see [8752].

The present portrait is an intense likeness of a man who – in the eyes of his contemporaries, during the belle époque – was a model to emulate. The gaze of the sitter is particularly successful in de László’s portrait. Proust himself, wrote of his “admirable eyes with a gaze which – although no one liked recreation as much as he did – was piercing when his mind was bent to some serious subject.”^[1]

The de Gramont family was one of the artist's most considerable European patrons. De László painted more than thirty portraits of three generations of the family between 1902 and 1931. He painted Armand on at least seven occasions, twice in 1902 [4502], in 1909 [8783], in 1913 [8784], twice in 1922 [8760] & [8786] and in 1931 [8136].

Antoine XII-Armand de Gramont, styled duc de Guiche, was born on 29 September 1879, the son of Antoine XI-Agénor de Gramont and his wife Marguerite-Alexandrine von Rothschild. In his early life he intended to be an artist and fraternised with the artistic community in Paris at the turn of the century, notably exhibiting a painting at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1904. Among his friends were Jacques-Emile Blanche, Marcel Proust and the Italian portrait painter Giovanni Boldini.  De László was part of this circle, having studied at the Académie Julian in 1890, and in time the two became lifelong friends. The duc often lent de László his studio at 42 bis Avenue Henri-Martin, where, over the years, many distinguished portraits were painted. The duc, however, ultimately pursued a scientific career working in the fields of piezo-electricity and aerodynamics. Achieving his Doctorate of Sciences in 1911, he became a distinguished physician and went on to found L'Institut d' Optique in Paris in 1916, which made France the leading nation in optical research for many years.  Among his writings are Analyse spectrale (Dunod, Paris, 1921), La Télémétrie monostatique (Paris, Gauthier-Villars, 1928), Problèmes de la vision (Flammarion, Paris, 1939), and Vers l’infiniment petit (Gallimard, Paris, 1945).^[2] As an entrepreneur, he founded in 1919 the firm “Optique et Précision de Levallois” (O.P.L.), to rival the German products of the time. In 1938, he diversified the products of his own company and designed, and later manufactured, the Foca camera. An officer of the Légion d’Honneur, in 1931 he was elected to the Académie des Sciences and became its President in 1956.

In 1904 he married Elaine Greffulhe [5515], only daughter of Henry, comte Greffulhe [6935] and Elisabeth, Princesse de Caraman-Chimay [4247], the distinguished and talented doyenne of Parisian arts and society. Together they had four sons and a daughter, the eldest son, Antoine, succeeding his father as 13th duc in 1962. Although the sitter and his wife never parted, their marriage was not a very happy one, Armand de Gramont having too much of an “eye for the ladies.” He died on 2 August 1962.

EXHIBITED:

•Paris, Salon de la société des artistes français, 1903, no. 1054 or 1055

•Galerie des Artistes modernes, Les Onze, Paris, March 1907
•Musée National du Château de Pau, La Belle époque des Gramont au temps des équipages, 8 October 1994-31 January 1995, no. 33

LITERATURE:

•Arsène, Alexandre. ‘Société des Artistes français, Salon de 1903’, Figaro Illustré, no. 159, June 1903, p. 19

•Proust, Marcel. Pastiches et mélanges, Nouvelle Revue française, Paris, 1919, p. 82

•Rutter, Owen, Portrait of a Painter, London, 1939, p. 210

•Chaleyssin, Patrick. La Peinture mondaine de 1870 à 1960, Celia Editions, Ermont, France, 1993, p. 34, pl. 59

•De Laszlo, Sandra, ed., & Christopher Wentworth-Stanley, asst. ed., A Brush with Grandeur, Paul Holberton publishing, London 2004, p. 61, ill. fig. 50

•Hart-Davis, Duff, in collaboration with Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, De László: His Life and Art, Yale University Press, 2010, p. 79-81

•Hillerin, Laure, La comtesse Greffulhe: L’Ombre des Guermantes, Flammarion, 2015, p. 404, ill p. 4 of inserted pages of illustrations

•Field, Katherine ed., Transcribed by Susan de Laszlo, The Diaries of Lucy de László Volume I: (1890-1913), de Laszlo Archive Trust, 2019, pp. 61, 172

CC 2008