6127

The Right Honourable Alfred Lyttelton 1908

Three-quarter length, standing to the left, face turned and looking to the viewer, wearing a dark suit with a wing collar and dark tie, his right hand raised to his lapel, his left hand resting on a cane

Oil on canvas, 120.5 x 77.5 cm (47.5 x 30.5 in.)

Inscribed lower left:  P.A. László / 1908  

Laib L6835(838) / C16(10)  A.Lyttelton

Private Collection

De László had his first English solo exhibition at the Fine Art Society in May and June 1907, which led to a flurry of portrait requests from new patrons. Included among these were Arthur Balfour [2707], Arthur Lee [11019], and Lord and Lady Wemyss [7671] & [7678]. Lucy de László recorded Alfred Lyttelton’s first sitting in her diary on 7 May 1908, the same day as James Lowther, Speaker of the House of Commons [10209], who sat for just one hour on that occasion.

After Lyttelton’s death de László set up a private subscription for heliogravure reproductions of the painting. The price was £1.1.0 or one of fifty signed artist’s proofs could be obtained for £2.2.0, with proceeds benefiting a London charity. Subscribers included Arthur Balfour, Doctor Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury [4632], the Duke of Devonshire [4431], William Gladstone, and Earl Spencer.^[1] De László also painted a copy of the present portrait for the School Hall at Eton College [37], in which collection it remains.

Alfred Lyttelton was born on 7 February 1857 at Hagley Hall, Worcestershire. He was the eighth son and youngest of the twelve children of George William Lyttelton, fourth Baron Lyttelton (1817–1876), and his wife, Mary Glynne (1813–1857), sister-in-law of Prime Minister William Gladstone. He went to preparatory school in Brighton and then to Eton College in January 1868. At Eton he was known as a supreme all-round sportsman. Lord Curzon [3890] his friend there, later wrote that ‘no athlete was ever quite such an athlete, and no boyish hero was ever quite such a hero as was Alfred Lyttelton.’

In 1875 he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the Apostle.^[2] He was disappointed with a second class degree in history. Lyttelton was a leading cricketer of his day and captained Cambridge from 1876 until 1879,  undefeated. He took up royal tennis at Cambridge, and held the amateur championship from 1882 until 1896, while continuing to play cricket. His family were not wealthy enough to support him so he was called to the bar in 1881 and from 1882 to 1885 he was legal private secretary to Sir Henry James, the attorney-general.

He married his first wife Octavia Laura Tennant in May 1885; however she died in childbirth eleven months later, leaving a son who died from tubercular meningitis in 1888. On 18 April 1892 Lyttelton married Edith Sophy Balfour (1865–1948), daughter of Archibald Balfour, a London businessman. They had two sons and a daughter, one of the sons dying in infancy.

Lyttelton declared his Liberal Unionism in 1894 and was MP for Warwick and Leamington from 1895 to 1906. He also increased his standing at the bar, being recorder of Hereford, 1893–4, and of Oxford, 1894–1903, and taking silk in 1900. In that year Joseph Chamberlain sent him to South Africa as chairman of the Transvaal concessions commission to plan post-war reconstruction. On Chamberlain's resignation in September 1903, Lyttelton was appointed colonial secretary.

Lyttelton lost his seat in the 1906 general election, but was unopposed for St George's, Hanover Square, at a by-election in June 1906. He held the seat easily in 1910. He did not return to the bar but was a director of the London and Westminster Bank and other companies. He opposed Welsh disestablishment, advocated housing and town-planning reform, and supported women's suffrage and the government's Trade Boards Bill to improve conditions in sweated industries. He was an active supporter of the university settlement movement.

While scoring 89 in a cricket match at Bethnal Green he was struck in the stomach and developed an abscess, from which he died on 5 July 1913 at a nursing home at 3 Devonshire Terrace, London. He was buried in Hagley churchyard. The Oxford–Cambridge cricket match was briefly stopped to mark his passing and H. H. Asquith gave a memorable tribute to the Commons on 8 July: ‘he, perhaps of all men of this generation, came nearest to the mould and ideal of manhood, which every English father would like to see his son aspire to, and if possible to attain.’

PROVENANCE:

Edith Lyttelton, the sitter’s wife

EXHIBITED:  

•The Dowdeswell Galleries, London, An Exhibition of Portraits by Philip A. Laszlo, June and July 1908, no. 24  

•Glaspalast, Munich, International Exhibition, 1909, no. 907

LITERATURE:  

•Von Schleinitz, O.,  Künstler Monographien, Vol. 106, Ph. A. von László, Bielefeld & Leipzig, 1913, p. 106

•Rutter, Owen, Portrait of a Painter, London, 1939, p. 263

•Field, Katherine ed., Transcribed by Susan de Laszlo, The Diaries of Lucy de László Volume I: (1890-1913), de Laszlo Archive Trust, 2019, p. 127-128

•László, Lucy de, 1908 diary, 7 May entry, p. 152

•NSzL150-0161, letter from de László to Elek Lippich, 18 April 1909

CC 2008

KF 2017