6953

Study portrait

Mrs John Walter, née Charlotte Hilda ‘Phyllis’ Foster 1924

Head and shoulders to the left, full face, wearing Spanish costume, a lace mantilla with a black dress, drop earrings and a gold crucifix on a chain round her neck

Oil on board, 85.5 x 58.1 cm (33 ¼  x 22 ¾ in.)

Inscribed lower left: de László / 1924

Laib L1159 (799) / C27 (13)  

Sitters’ Book II, opp. f. 40: Phyllis^[1] Walter. May 16th 1924. [beneath the signature of her husband]

Private Collection

De László and Mrs Walter attended the same fancy dress ball in London in the spring of 1924, where he was struck by her Spanish costume and asked for an introduction. He persuaded her to sit for her portrait and over the course of seven sittings, 12–23 May, completed two portraits of her and one of her husband, John Walter [7651].^[2] The second portrait [112192] was taken by a member of her family to Budapest, where it was lost and presumed destroyed in the Second World War but has recently been discovered in Hungary. The present portrait was taken to Prague in 1936 by a daughter of the sitter and disappeared during the war. Its owner went to live in America and in 1955 the portrait arrived, sent by an unknown source.

Spanish formal dress was a costume explored a number of times by de László, most notably in his portraits of  Doña Olga Budge de Edwards [5139] in 1920 and Queen Ena of Spain [12398] painted in 1927. The elaborate headdress with its layers of black lace allowed him to indulge his bravura painting technique. It was popularised by Queen Ena and the sitter was part of her circle of English ladies who kept her company at the Spanish court.  

Charlotte Hilda ‘Phyllis’ Foster was born 8 October 1876, the youngest daughter of Col. Charles E. Foster of Long Buckby Hall, Northamptonshire and his wife Amelia Sophie Mason. She was born at their London house, 7 Montagu Square, Marylebone and baptized 20 December at the parish church of St. Mary’s. She married John Walter 7 November 1903 at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, with six children as bridesmaids dressed in ‘Kate Greenaway’ frocks.^[3] Walter was chief proprietor of The Times newspaper and sometime chairman of the Board of Directors. There were four children of the marriage, Pamela (born 1907), John (born 1908), Roderick (born 1911), and Ines (born 1914).  

As war broke out in Europe in 1914, the family went to live in Madrid, where John Walter worked as Press Attaché for the British Embassy. Their eldest child, Pamela, described in her unpublished memoirs the excitement of accompanying her mother to the Rastro, Madrid’s famous flea market, on Sundays, where Mrs Walter bargained for beautiful, but often stolen, goods. She could never pass an antique shop without stopping to purchase and as a result their houses in Spain, and later in England, were furnished with valuable rugs, paintings, and Spanish decorative art.  

One of Mrs Walter’s closest friends in Madrid was Spain’s Queen Victoria-Eugenia [7933], an English granddaughter of Queen Victoria. They, and a small group of fellow exiles, would meet for sewing and tea and talk longingly about England and the danger of the War and the Germans: “The Queen and my mother were both simple souls who saw things in black and white, and knew very little about politics or economics, or other more subtle reasons for the Great War.”^[4] 

Mrs Walter was enchanted by Spain and all things Spanish, and remained so all her life. She was sensitive to the cruelty shown to animals in that country and her children were brought up as strict vegetarians on these grounds. Much to her husband’s irritation, their summer home on the Spanish coast was regularly full of the needy of all kinds, “starving” artists, lonely widows and divorcees, Zionist fanatics and unlikely religious and philosophic adherents.

The sitter died on 4 April 1937 and is buried at Bear Wood Church near the family home, Bear Wood, Wokingham in Berkshire. The Times records the memories of an unidentified but intimate friend of the sitter: “Hers was a singularly sweet and happy personality, and we mourn one whose charm had a certain flower-like quality of freshness and grace, so that without effort she radiated pleasure and ease to all…her engaging capacity for enjoyment was combined with a warm and instinctive sympathy with suffering and helplessness.”^[5]

PROVENANCE:

Mrs Pamela Landegger, daughter of the sitter

EXHIBITED:

•The French Gallery, London, A Series of Portraits and Studies by Philip A. de László, M.V.O., June 1924, no. 44

•Christie’s, King Street, London, A Brush with Grandeur, 6-22 January 2004, no. 92

LITERATURE:

•Architectural Digest, Vol. 59 (2002), p. 21

KF & CWS 2013