6799

Mrs Whitelaw Reid, née Elisabeth Mills 1922

Seated three-quarter length to the right, wearing a black dress with an organza stole, three strings of pearls round her neck, her hands clasped together resting in her lap

Oil on canvas, 108 x 76.2 cm (42 ½ x 30 in.)

Inscribed lower right: de László / 1922

Laib L11034(882) / C28(36): Mrs. Whitelaw Reid

NPG Album 1921-23, p. 3

Sitters’ Book II, f. 31: Elisabeth M. Reid . July 4th . 1922

Private Collection

This portrait was painted in London where the sitter spent much time with her daughter Jean [3408], who was painted by de László in 1922, and her son-in-law, Sir John Ward, painted in 1916 [1697]. Their sons, Jackie and Reggie Ward, sat for a double portrait in 1927 [3412].

When the picture was exhibited in New York in 1943 the critic Henry McBride remarked: “Go see the magnificent pearls and costumes in the portraits of the Golden Nineties Exhibition...Notice the sense of security in the ladies who supported the grandeur of those days. . . [O]f course, there was Philip de Laszlo, who did pearls so well. See the ‘Mrs. Whitelaw Reid’ on this occasion. Mr. de Laszlo knew the difference between a $100,000 string and a $250,000 string, and made it apparent.”^[1]

Elisabeth Mills, daughter of Darius Ogden Mills (1825-1910) and Jean Templeton Cunningham, was born in New York City on 6 January 1858. Her father made a fortune in banking and mining and when he died in 1910 he left nearly $50 million to be split between her and her brother, Ogden Mills. She spent her childhood in Sacramento and San Mateo, California, and with her maternal grandparents at their home in the Hudson River Valley. After an early education by governesses, she went to Mlle Vallette’s school in Paris, and thence to the New York school of Anna C. Brackett. On 26 April 1881 she married Whitelaw Reid (1837-1912), the publisher of the New York Tribune, who was nearly twenty years older than she. They had a son, Ogden Mills Reid (born 1882), and a daughter, Jean Templeton Reid. The Reids maintained a home in New York City at 451 Madison Avenue, and a country house, Ophir Hall, an 800-acre estate at Purchase, Westchester County, New York.^[2]

Whitelaw Reid served as the United States Minister to France from 1889 to 1892, before running unsuccessfully for Vice President. In 1905 he was appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, London, a post he would hold until his death in 1912. Mrs Reid was an energetic hostess, entertaining at the two houses they rented, Dorchester House, Park Lane, in London and Wrest Park in Bedfordshire. They were particularly known for their Fourth of July parties to which there were invited 5000 guests each summer.

On the death of her husband in 1912, she inherited a controlling interest in the New York Tribune, the editorship of which was assumed by their son Ogden in 1913 (the paper became the Herald Tribune in 1924). Through her son she exerted a strong, albeit indirect, influence on the paper. Like her father, she maintained a lifelong interest in philanthropy, founding two hospitals, the Mills Hospital for Poor Folk in New York City and the Mills Hospital in San Mateo. Reid Hall at Columbia University was also named after her.

During the First World War she served as chairman of the American Red Cross in London, and deputy commissioner of the Red Cross in Great Britain. She regularly travelled to inspect the field hospitals in France and her efforts were recognised by the French Government when she was made a chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. This portrait was possibly painted to celebrate that achievement.

She died of double pneumonia on 29 April 1931 at her daughter’s Villa Rosemary at St-Jean, Cap Ferrat, France.^[3] Her obituary in Time magazine noted that “the nation mourned the death of one of its few authentically great ladies.”^[4]

The sitter was also drawn by John Singer Sargent in 1910.

EXHIBITED:

•Grand Central Art Galleries, New York, Portraits of Yesterday and Today: A Loan Exhibition Showing Distinguished Personalities of the New York Scene in the Golden Nineties, 4-16 May 1943

LITERATURE:

•Bax, Emily, Miss Bax of the Embassy, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1939, p. 158, ill.

•Kluger, Richard, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, 1989, p. 310, ill.

•McBride, Henry, The Flow of Art: Essays and Criticisms (Henry McBride Series in Modernism and Modernity), Atheneum Publishers, 1975, reissued by Yale University Press, 1997, p. 392

MD & KF 2016