111271

Study portrait

Marie Kestranek 1902

Half-length to the left, wearing a white chiffon dress or blouse with a large white bow round the neck, pearl earrings

Oil on board, 69 x 49 cm (27 ⅛  x 18 ⅓ in.)

Inscribed lower right: in Verehrung [in admiration] / László FE / Vienne 1902

Sitters’ Book I, f. 51: Marie Kestranek

Private Collection

De László painted several portraits of members of the Kestranek family, whom he had got to know through his friend and mentor, Bishop Vilmos Fraknói, between 1902 and 1908, the present portrait of Mizzi Kestranek, the wife of Fraknói’s nephew, Wilhelm (also known as Vilmos en famille) (1863–1925), being the first. They had married in Vienna on 23 September 1893 and had four children, two sons and two daughters.

Marie Lenk, known as “Mizzi”, was born in Prague on 28 August 1872, the eldest of the two daughters of Robert Lenk (d. 1915), a director of the Prague Iron Industry Company, and his wife Marie, née Max (c.1849–1931). Mizzi’s grandfather, the celebrated sculptor, Emanuel Max (1810–1901), a pupil of the painter Leopold Kupelwieser, was ennobled in 1896 as Ritter von Wachstein.

Mizzi Kestranek developed a great appreciation of the arts and was a popular and well-known figure in Viennese society. Despite her husband’s difficult and overbearing character, she remained passionately devoted to him. De László, who himself became a great friend of Wilhelm Kestranek, painted his portrait in  London in 1908 [111270].

Her health suffered following the suicide of her younger son, Paul, on 1 March 1925. On 19 May that year she was accompanying her husband in Vienna when he collapsed and died of a stroke. The shock was too great for her and the following day she too suffered a fatal stroke.

LITERATURE:

•László, Lucy de, diary 1902-1911, private collection, 15 June 1902 entry, p. 30

•DLA090-0089, press cutting, [undated, page unknown]

CWS 2013