6433

Captain Thomas Arthur Nelson 1916

Half-length slightly to the left, head turned and looking right, wearing a greatcoat over service dress of the Lothians and Border Horse

Oil on canvas, 80 x 55.9 cm (31 ½ x 22 in.)

Inscribed lower right: László / 1916 Oct.

Laib L8485(226) / C20(20) Captain T. Nelson

NPG Album 1912-16, p. 38, where labelled: Captain Th. A. Nelson / 1916. / †

Sitters’ Book II, opp. f. 8: Thomas A. Nelson  † Oct: 12th 16

Private Collection

Captain Nelson and his brother, Captain Ian Theodore Nelson [6437], were both painted in service dress in 1916. De László painted many such portraits for a reduced fee of £100 and was popular among serving officers for his speed when they had little time to sit before going to the front. The sitter was killed just six months after this portrait was painted and the artist added a cross to mark his death in the Sitters’ Book and National Portrait Gallery Album. He painted Captain Nelson’s wife in March 1917 [6436].

In July 1917 de László received a letter from Doctor Alexander Barbour: “Your portrait of my cousin Lieut. T. A. Nelson [6433] who fell in France last April is a priceless possession to his widow and Mother now. How many homes you have comforted in these sad days.”^[1]

Thomas Arthur Nelson was born 26 September 1876, the elder son of Thomas Nelson (1822-1882), of St Leonard’s, Edinburgh and his wife Janet Kemp (1847-1919). He went to University College, Oxford and captained the Rugby XV. In 1898 he played for Scotland against England. Throughout childhood, and at Oxford, his closest friend was Ernest Balfour (1874-1897). On 18 June 1903 he married Balfour’s sister Margaret, third daughter of Alexander Balfour of Dawyck in the chapel on her family estate. There were six children of the marriage: Thomas (born 1904), Alexander (born 1906), Kirsty (born 1905), Esther (born 1910), Elisabeth (born 1912) and Bridget (born 1914).

At the outbreak of the First World War Nelson immediately rejoined his Yeomanry, the Lothians and Border Horse and trained with them at home until September 1915. In October he went to France and his squadron was attached to the 25th Division as cavalry. In March 1917 he joined the Tank Regiment as an intelligence officer and on 9 April was killed by a shell at Arras, watching his tanks advance towards the railway station they would successfully take.

John Buchan, a friend from Oxford and later 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, joined Nelson at his family’s printing firm in 1906. He wrote about Nelson in These for Remembrance: Memoirs of Six Friends Killed in the Great War (1918): “His presence warmed and lit up so big a region of life that in thinking of him one is overwhelmed by the multitude of things which he made better by simply existing among them … The first feeling of most of us is simply that the world since April 1917 is a dingier and bleaker place than it used to be.”^[2] 

The sitter is buried at Faubourg-d'Amiens Cemetery in the town of Arras, Pas-de-Calais.

LITERATURE:

•Buchan, John, These for Remembrance: Memoirs of Six Friends Killed in the Great War, Buchan & Enright Publishers, 1987, ill. opp. p. 1

•Hart-Davis, Duff, in collaboration with Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, De László: His Life and Art, Yale University Press, 2010, p. 149

•Field, Katherine, with essays by Sandra de Laszlo and Richard Ormond, Philip de László: Master of Elegance, Blackmore, 2024, p. 84, ill.

•DLA014-0005, letter from Doctor Alexander Hugh Freeland Barbour to de László, 24 July 1917

KF 2021