6762

Study portrait

Lady Rosemary Baring 1925

Half-length to the right, looking to the left, wearing an organza stole over her day dress and holding three purple tulips and one white to her breast in her left hand

Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 63.5 cm (30 x 25 in.)

Inscribed lower left: de László / 1925. V. 

Laib L14715 (812) / C2 (14A)

NPG Album 1919-25, p. 24b

Sitters’ Book II, f. 44: Rosemary Baring May 16th 1925

Private Collection

The present portrait was commissioned by Lady Rosemary’s grandparents, the Earl and Countess of Minto, as a gift for the Earl and Countess of Cromer, their son-in-law and daughter. De László asked an exceptionally low honorarium of fifty guineas for this portrait, but begged Lady Minto not to mention this to anyone. Having already painted Lord [6334] and Lady Minto [6343] in 1912, and their elder son Victor in 1915 [6347], de László went on to paint the Earl [4263] and Countess of Cromer [4270], as well as their younger daughter Lady Violet, in 1935 [8244]. The artist also painted a half-length portrait of the sitter’s aunt, Lady Violet Astor, in 1927 [2445].

The correspondence between Lady Minto and the artist suggests that she tried to attend her granddaughter’s sittings, and took great interest in the development of the painting.^[1] Lady Rosemary clearly remembered being painted by de László. She later wrote: “I was naturally very in awe of the great man, but I was young and my mother and he had fascinating conversations which I tremendously enjoyed hearing. What did amuse me at the second sitting was that he was most annoyed at me turning up with tulips of a different colour to clutch to my bosom to those I had at the previous sitting some three weeks earlier.  He obviously wasn’t a gardener, & so couldn’t understand the first variety being over. I quite see it must have been exasperating for him! To have sat for him was a wonderful experience.”

It was perhaps Lady Cromer who best expressed her satisfaction with the portrait of Lady Rosemary: “I wish I could tell you the intense pleasure your lovely picture of Rosemary gives me. When one feels gratitude deeply, it is always hardest to express, and the joy literally turns into tears of gladness, so that words are poor things in which to describe our feelings. My mother will have told you how much I had longed for you to do a painting of Rosemary. And now that I am to have this wonderful possession it almost seems too good to be true. […] I love the expression you have caught; one which I know so well and which seems to embody so much of her real self, character, youth and innocence – and I now realize how charming it is to have her portrait just at this age of 16: the childhood behind her, and on the threshold of the life stretching before her, for which these early years should have been a preparation, and towards which from your canvas she looks out so fearlessly.”^[2] 

Lady Rosemary Ethel Baring was born on 17 December 1908, the eldest daughter of Rowland Thomas Baring, later 2nd Earl of Cromer and his wife Lady Ruby Florence Mary Elliot.^[3] She married Lieutenant Colonel John Hills, M.C., M.A., later Headmaster of Bradfield College, Berkshire, on 8 October 1932, and together they had three children: Jean Adini (born 1933), Margaret Ruby (born 1934) and John Evelyn Baring (born 1939). Lady Rosemary was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society after she became one of the first women to climb two famous mountains in the Rockies, one of which was Mount Edith Cavell (c. 1928). A shy and reserved person, she preferred gardening and hunting on Exmoor to socialising in London. She died aged ninety-five on 14 April 2004 at Taunton, Somerset.

EXHIBITED:

•The French Gallery, London, A Series of Portraits and Studies by Philip A. de László, M.V.O., June 1927, no. 18

LITERATURE:

•Para Ti, Argentina, 1925, cover ill.

•Woman’s Journal, Vol. I, no. 6, April 1928, front cover, ill.                      

•Rutter, Owen, Portrait of a Painter, London, 1939, pp. 356-57

•Correspondence from de László to Lady Minto, in the possession of a descendant of the recipient.

CC 2008