10968

Study portrait

Baroness Friedrich von Ringhoffer, née Aline von Seybel 1906

Almost half-length in three quarter profile to the left, her red hair in a knot on the top of her head, wearing an amber necklace and a white chiffon stole fastened at her breast, decorated with a white rose tinged with pink

Oil on board (under oval mount), 76 x 64 cm (30 x 25 ¼ in.)

Inscribed lower left: László F. E. / 1906 / I

Private Collection

Aline Seybel, always known as Liny, was born in Vienna on Christmas Eve 1891, the youngest child and only daughter of the chemicals industrialist Paul Seybel (1846-1915) and his wife Aline, née von Schoeller. As a child Liny had been painted twice by Carl Fröschl.^[1] She had just turned fourteen when the present portrait was executed in January 1906.

On 30 September 1916 Liny (by then von Seybel as her father and uncles had been ennobled in 1912) married Baron Friedrich ‘Fritz’ von Ringhoffer (1884-1945), the eldest son of a Bohemian industrialist and at that time a highly decorated Dragoon officer. They had one son, Friedrich Wenzel.^[2] From 1922 the couple lived apart as Liny became the inseparable companion of the glamorous “Bachelor Baron” Louis Rothschild,^[3] the head of the Vienna banking house S.M.Rothschild & Söhne. Between the wars Liny, with her red hair and brown eyes, was known as one of the most beautiful women in Europe and following de László she was later portrayed by John Quincy Adams^[4] [10921] and Carl Theodor von Blaas^[5] among others. Among her friends she included Countess Kitty Schönborn-Buchheim [3341] later Baroness Eugen Rothschild, the sister-in-law of Louis) and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Despite speculation, religious scruples prevented Liny and Louis considering marriage, and Fritz and Liny only divorced in 1941. In 1939, following Louis’s release from Nazi captivity in Vienna on the payment of a vast ransom and his escape to Paris, Liny herself was arrested and kept hostage to prevent the Rothschild family opening proceedings against the German government to reclaim the ransom. In 1946, on Long Island, New York, Louis finally married the twice divorced Countess Hildegard Auersperg. Liny retired to Salzburg where she died on 7 July 1957.

In a eulogy August von Miller-Aichholz (whose mother and sister were painted in a double portrait [13477] by de László) wrote: “Everyone who knew her, and how many, many there were of them, had to state time and again with amazement, right up to her so completely unexpected death, that with her, this gracious Austrian woman, time itself seemed to have stood still. Today one has to turn the clock back quite some way in order to dally in thought in the era in which “die Liny” represented as it were the model for the Austrian beauty. It was the time of the last years before the First World War when life for us didn’t carry on at supersonic speed and the portraits of the beautiful women of our country which were put up for show every year at the Spring Exhibition of the Vienna Künstlerhaus by painters such as Laszlo [sic], Adams, Schattenstein, Torggler, Mehoffer and all the rest weren’t yet described with the epithet ‘self-willed’… now with her another piece of most charming Old Austrianness has moved on to Eternity –  Sleep well Liny!”^[6]

The present portrait was exhibited at the Annual Exhibition at the Künstlerhaus in March 1906.^[7] Liny's uncle Otto Seybel was a major patron of the Künstlerhaus and her father was a minor one. The picture apparently remained in the collection of the Künstlerhaus until it was dispersed in the 1990s although the register shows the portrait was returned to "Otto or Paul Seybel" on 11 June 1906 after the exhibition. A visiting card of the sitter's mother attached to the back of the frame gives her address as Reisnerstrasse 50. When de László submitted his portrait of Countess Kitty Schönborn-Buchheim to the Künstlerhaus for the 1922 Autumn Exhibition he gave his address as "Reisnerstrasse 50".

An undated head study [5454] showing Liny with the same coiffure and possibly the same amber necklace remained in the collection of the artist’s brother.

PROVENANCE:        

•Previously in the collection of the Vienna Künstlerhaus                        

•Sold at auction at the Dorotheum on 18 December 1996, lot 158 (Madame Aline Debel [sic], née de Schoeller)

•Galerie Boris Wilnitsky, Vienna 

EXHIBITED:        

•Künstlerhaus, Vienna, Annual Exhibition, 1906, n° 159

LITERATURE:        

•DLA070-0118, letter from Paul Seybel to de László, 6 February 1906

CWS 2009