6968

Lady Illingworth of Denton, née Margaret Mary Clare Wilberforce 1934

Seated full-length to the right and looking to the left, wearing a pale blue evening dress of tulle over silk with a pink sash and short puffed sleeves, a pearl bracelet on her left wrist, both hands resting on the right arm of the chair

Oil on canvas, 162.5 x 106.7 cm (64 x 42 in.)

Inscribed lower right: de László / 1934 V   

Laib L18543 (452) / C13 (16):  Lady Illingworth

NPG 1934 Album, p. 12

Sitters’ Book II, f. 76: Margaret Illingworth Nov. 15th / 1933

Private Collection

In 1917, de László painted an attractive seated full-length portrait of Mrs Percy Illingworth [5713], the sister-in-law of Lady Illingworth, and it is likely that she had that work in mind when de László was commissioned to paint her. The composition, palette, and general conception of the present picture are also strongly reminiscent of the portrait of Lady Broughton, executed in 1922 [3730]. The artist, who had a passion for luxurious fabrics and strict views on what his sitters should wear, rendered the tulle overlay of Lady Illingworth’s silk satin dress by skimming the canvas with a light sweep of paint under a loose web of fluid, decisive brushstrokes to indicate the folds of the fabric.

The present portrait was certainly completed at the very beginning of May 1934, as it was proudly displayed at a party organised by Lord and Lady Illingworth on 12 May. As the artist and his wife were unable to attend, Lady Illingworth wrote to de László the following day: “The portrait came in for a lot of admiration, there were many friends and admirers of yours here.”^[1] De László also made a head and shoulders study-portrait of Lady Illingworth around the same period [5717]. According to one source, Lord Illingworth bought No. 44 Grosvenor Square “and had the drawing room redecorated by Sir Charles Allom in the fashionable Adam style with egg-shell blue panelling as a setting for de Laszlo’s portrait of his wife.”^[2]

De László’s vast oeuvre includes relatively few full-length portraits; he tended to favour three-quarter length formats when commissioned to paint large portraits. The increasingly high fees he commanded, combined with the impact the First World War had on British wealth, mean that most of his full-length portraits were executed in the 1910s. In the 1920s, most of his clientele for such works were American or South American, and he only painted about a dozen full-lengths in the 1930s, which makes a rarity of the present work. In 1934, the year it was executed, de László’s normal fee for a full-length portrait was 1400 guineas (the equivalent of £78,000 in today’s values) as opposed to 600 guineas for a half-length portrait.

Margaret Mary Clare was born on 23 November 1900, the only daughter of William Basil Wilberforce (1850-1913), of Markington Hall, Ripon, Yorkshire, and his wife Ada Mary Margaret Moody (1868-1937). On 18 November 1931 she married Albert Holden Illingworth, as his second wife.^[3] Like the Wilberforces, the Illingworths were of Yorkshire stock. Historically they made their wealth as wool combers, but Albert became a Member of Parliament. He was sworn of the Privy Council in 1916 and served as Postmaster General in Lloyd George's government until 1921, when he was raised to the peerage as 1st Baron Illingworth of Denton. There were no children of the marriage and the barony became extinct upon Albert Illingworth’s death on 23 January 1942.  

Lady Illingworth was proud of her great-grandfather, the abolitionist William Wilberforce (1759-1833). In 1933, she opened the Wilberforce Centenary exhibition in Hull and took an active interest in banning slavery in countries where it persisted. An elegant lady and society hostess, she lived in an opulent Georgian house at 44 Grosvenor Square. Once the town residence of the Earls of Harrowby, it was there, in June 1815, that the guests of the 1st Earl received Wellington’s victory dispatch from Waterloo. Every year, Lady Illingworth organised a summer ball to commemorate this event. When she lost her husband in 1942 he left the house to her, on the condition that she did not enter a convent (being a devout Roman Catholic). During the Second World War, she served as Commandant of the Voluntary Aid Detachment and was an associate of the Royal Red Cross. In 1967, her house was developed to make way for the Britannia Hotel, now the Millennium Hotel. Her wealth was immense: when she departed, it was reported that forty-seven vans of valuables were taken away by a storage firm. She moved to the Connaught, where she continued to entertain lavishly, and then to a mansion flat in Kensington, which she shared with her cousin Irene Florence Wilberforce (1900-1987).

The story of her later years is told in the book Blood Money:^[4] In 1984, she was taken away for a “holiday” by her niece, Baroness de Stempel, who gradually robbed her of all her possessions and fortune, under the pretence that Lady Illingworth had lost her sanity.^[5] She eventually succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease and died alone and in poverty in Langford House, a Hereford council nursing home, on 9 November 1986.

LITERATURE:

•László, Philip de, 1933 diary, private collection, 31 October entry, p. 3; 11 November entry, p. 13; 13 November entry, p. 14; 15 November entry, p. 16; 16 November entry, p. 17; 17 November entry, p. 18; 18 November entry, p. 19; 22 November entry, p. 22; 24 November entry, p. 23; 27 November entry, p. 25

•László, Lucy de, 1933 diary, private collection, 18 December entry, p. 353

•Colby, Reginald, Mayfair: A Town Within London, 1967, p. 51

•DLA135-0019, letter from de László to Marczell László, 25 November 1933

•DLA024-0202, letter from Lady Illingworth to de László, 13 May 1934

CC 2010