13015

Genre picture

An Old Woman Praying 1890

Seated three-quarter length in three-quarter profile to the left, wearing a dark coat or buttoned jacket, with a white blouse beneath, a black headscarf tied round her head and dark-rimmed spectacles, holding a rosary in both hands, clasped and resting upon a Bible open on her knees

Oil on canvas, 62 x 34 cm (24 ½ x 13 ½ in.)

Inscribed top left: Laub / 90.

Private Collection

During the first few months of 1890 de László was studying in Munich. On his return home he went to Ó-Becse in southern Hungary to spend the summer there at the invitation of his friend and first patron, Pál Grünbaum. In his reminiscences written nearly thirty years later, he recalled painting “a portrait, half life-size, of an old peasant woman praying with a rosary in her hand... I like to remember it, for I think it was the best work I did there, and it still lives in my memory as if I had painted it yesterday."^[1] The painting may have been inspired by Wilhelm Leibl's "Three Women in a Church" which was a well known work widely reproduced at the time.^[2]

It was in Ó-Becse^[3] that de László painted his most important genre pictures, including The Storyteller [10937] of 1891. That finished painting remains untraced, but there exists an oil study for its main figure [12433] for which de László used a very similar palette to the one he used in the present painting.

PROVENANCE:

Sold in Budapest by the artist, presumably in 1890^[4]

Sold at Bizományi Áruház Vállalat (Consignment Store Company) auction, Budapest, 1967, lot 59

Sold in the spring auction at Mű-Terem Galéria^[5], Budapest, 2003, lot 127

EXHIBITED:

•Međunarodna izložba umjetnina (International Art Exhibition), Zagreb, 1891

LITERATURE:              

•Óbecse és Vidéke (Ó-Becse and its Surroundings), Ó-Becse, 20 December 1891        

•Owen Rutter, Portrait of a Painter, London, 1939, p. 76

•Field, Katherine ed., Gábor Bellák and Beáta Somfalvi, Philip de László (1869-1937); "I am an Artist of the World", Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, 2019, p. 13, ill.

BS 2015