4645

Mrs Chambers Haldane MacFall, née Mabel Plumridge 1911

Seated half-length in three-quarter profile and looking to the viewer, wearing a dark coat and a navy blue shawl, her left hand raised to her chest

Oil on canvas, 100 x 76 cm (39 ½ x 30 in.)

Indistinctly inscribed top left: To Mrs. H. Macfall / P.A. László. To Mrs. H. Macfall / 1911. XII.  

Laib L5619 (782) / C30 (19): Unidentified woman

NPG 1903-1914 Album, p. 76      

NPG 1907-13 Album, p. 25

Sitters’ Book I, f. 90: Mabel Haldane Macfall / Dec: 11th 1911

Private Collection

The history of the formation of a friendship between the MacFalls and the de Lászlós is not certain. However, the sitters’ husband Chambers Macfall, an art critic, was extremely well connected in the London art world of the time. The present portrait is mentioned in an article in The Daily Graphic, reviewing a party the MacFalls hosted at their house in West Kensington.^[1] “One day, when this artist was visiting the Macfalls, he saw, standing in one of the rooms a big old-gold frame, which held no picture. ‘I will paint you something to put in it,’ he said. ‘It’s too beautiful a frame to lie idle.’ So he sent for his palette and paints and began to paint Mrs MacFall herself. Then Haldane (as he was known) was sent out to buy a pair of new kid gloves to complete the picture; those Mrs. MacFall was told to wear. It only took de Laszlo a morning to paint; but it ranks among the best things he had done.”^[2] De László preferred painting the canvas in its frame but in this instance, the frame does not appear to have been sent to the artist’s studio for the sittings. De László was obliged to re-inscribe the canvas, owing to part of the original dedication being covered when the gold frame was fitted.

Mabel Macfall signed the sitters’ book at the artist’s studio on 11 December 1911 and de László’s appointment book shows she was to arrive at 10am that morning. Lucy de László mentions the picture in her diary on 21 December. “About a week ago, he painted on mil[l]board Mrs MacFall in 4 hours – red hair blue veil, amber complexion,  int: head - - a masterpiece.” It would appear from the appointment book that she did, in fact, have another sitting on 13 December, although sittings on the 15 and 16 December are crossed out indicating they probably did not take place. Later engagements between the families suggest that the friendship was a long-standing one, meeting from time to time for lunch and at parties held by each other and their mutual acquaintance.^[3]

Mabel Annie Plumridge was born in March 1861 at Hopton Hall, Suffolk, to Admiral Sir James Hanway Plumridge, K.C.B (1787-1863) and his wife Georgina (born 1823), of St John’s, Newfoundland.^[4] Admiral Plumridge had a long and distinguished naval career between 1799 and 1857 and was present at the Battle of Trafalgar.^[5] Mabel’s father died when she was just two, leaving an estate worth nearly £20,000. Her mother was granted an annuity to raise her six children and they had moved to 10 Compton Court, Charlton, Surrey by the time of the 1871 census.

In 1883 Mabel married Canadian-born, Robert Poole Dalton Gabbett (born 1848) in Portsea Island, Hampshire. He was a physician in the British Army.^[6] After his death in 1899 she married Chambers Haldane Cooke MacFall (1860-1928) on 1 January 1904 at the Parish church of St Marylebone, London. He was identified on the marriage certificate as a bachelor and Lieutenant in the West India Regiment, living at 21 Park Road and she, a widow, living at 80 Upper Gloucester Place.

Lieutenant Chambers MacFall was the son of an army surgeon, David Chambers Macfall who had married the feminist writer and activist Sarah Grand in 1870. Lt Macfall saw active service in Jamaica and the West Indies between 1885 and 1892 but was forced to give up his army career after contracting yellow fever in Sierra Leone. He then established a successful career in painting, exhibiting at the Royal Academy between 1891 and 1923, and writing both art historical texts and novels.^[7] He died in 1928 at Queen Alexandra’s Military Hospital, Millbank, Middlesex leaving Mabel his effects and The White House in Challoner Crescent, West Kensington. Mabel MacFall died in February 1931 leaving her estate to her widowed twin sister Cora Ethel Boyce.^[8]

PROVENANCE

Sotheby’s, London, 19 June 1929, lot 107;

Sotheby’s, London, 1 May 1931, lot 146;

By descent in the family

EXHIBITED

•Royal Society of British Artists, Annual Exhibition, 1912, no. 65

•Agnew’s, London, Exhibition of Portraits by Philip A. de László, M.V.O. on behalf of the Artist’s General Benevolent Institution, June-July 1913, no. 3

LITERATURE

•“Royal Society of British Artists,” The Pall Mall Gazette, 18 March 1912, p. 3

•The Studio Magazine, London, 1913, Vol. LIX (59), pp. 299-306, ill. p. 300

•Field, Katherine ed., Transcribed by Susan de Laszlo, The Diaries of Lucy de László Volume I: (1890-1913), de Laszlo Archive Trust, 2019, p. 199, ill. pp. 183, 212

•László, Lucy de, 1911 diary, private collection

•László, Lucy de, 1916 appointment book, private collection

•DLA093-0028 The Daily Graphic, 17 September 1923

KF 2012