111473

Posthumous portrait

Madame Mór Schlesinger, née Katalin Deutsch 1890

Half-length, in three quarter-profile to the left, wearing a black dress with a white collar just visible, holding a fan in her left hand

Oil on canvas, 85 × 58 cm (33 ½  x 22 ⅞ in.)

Inscribed lower right: László F. 890.

Magyar Nemzeti Galéria (Hungarian National Gallery), Budapest

De László spent three summers in Ó-Becse,^[1] a small thriving country town in the Bácska region of southern Hungary, between 1889–1891. There he met the Schlesinger family through his friend  [111472] Mátyás Polákovits, who was married to Hermina [11600], daughter of the sitter. The present portrait is a characteristic example of de László’s early portraiture, and particularly of those he painted in Ó-Becse, before his second, more extensive period of training in Munich. They are stiff and sombre in tone, suggesting an honest likeness of the sitter, with little in the way of background.^[2] This portrait is also unusual being a posthumous portrait, something the artist only rarely did during his career owing to his reluctance to work from photographs rather than nature. Other later examples are Prince Maurice of Battenberg [3501] and the Honourable Robert Palmer [7071], both killed in the First World War.

De László notes in his memoirs that he made five posthumous portraits of Madame Schlesinger and five of her husband Mór Schlesinger [111472], perhaps one for each of their five children.^[3] The other versions have not yet been traced. The fact that the present portrait has not been identified as a copy in the artist’s inscription suggests that it is the primary version. Another example of this practise is the portrait of an Unidientified Lady Wearing a Gold Brooch [111204], where de László has clearly indicated that [96] is the copy.

Of some twenty portraits de László made of the Schlesinger family those that have been traced are the present picture and the pendant portrait of her husband [111472], which descended in the sitter’s family before being given to the Hungarian National Gallery in 1968. Those of Madame Schlesinger’s daughter Hermina [111395] [11600] and her grand-daughter, Katalin Sándor [7086] have also been traced.

Katalin Deutsch was born in about 1838, daughter of Leopold Deutsch (c.1792 - 1855) and Rosalia Bleier (c.1803 - 1880). She married Mór Schlesinger and they had one son, Pál (born 1860), and four daughters, Ida (born 1861), Hermina (born 1861), Emma (born 1863), Kornélia (born 1866). The sitter died on 21 August 1885 at the age of 48. She is buried together with her husband at the Salgótarjáni utca Jewish Cemetery in Budapest.

PROVENANCE:
By descent in the family of the sitter;

Bequeathed by the sitter’s daughter-in-law to the Hungarian National Gallery in 1968

LITERATURE:

•Rutter, Owen, Portrait of a Painter, London, 1939, p. 60

BS

2017