110708

Baroness Alexandrine Mayer-Ketschendorf  1907

Head-and-shoulders slightly to the left, full face looking to the viewer, wearing a large white plumed hat, a pearl drop pendant, her dress just indicated, decorated with a pink rose or bow

Oil on board, 54 x 54 cm (21 ⅛ x 21 ⅛ in.), sight size, circular

Inscribed lower right: PA László 1907. v

Inscribed centre left: ALEXANDRINE

Sitters’ Book I, opp. f. 66: Irma Mayer-Ketschendorf / II i Siegwart Frhr. v. Mayer Ketschendorf 8/XII 1903

Private Collection

The hat the sitter is wearing is most likely to be one de László used for quite a number of his sitters in the first decade of the century, for example, Princess Louise of Battenberg, 1907 [3481] and Madame Randebrock, 1910 [6734].

Alexandrine Baroness Mayer auf Ketschendorf bei Coburg was born on 15 September 1901, the daughter of Baron Siegwart Mayer-Ketschendorf (1861-1929) and his wife Irma, the daughter of the industrialist David von Gutmann. Alexandrine’s grandfather and great uncle, Jakob and Adolf Mayer were Jewish traders in the Duchy of Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha who were ennobled in 1889, thereafter styling themselves Freiherrn (Barons) von Mayer. In 1891 Alexandrine’s father suppressed the name Mayer in favour of the more aristocratic sounding Ketschendorf after the family’s home near Coburg. Sometime after Alexandrine’s birth in Ketschendorf Siegwart became a partner in his father-in-law’s bank, Bankhaus Gutmann, and the family moved to Schwarzenbergplatz 13 in Vienna. The sitter’s parents both signed the artist’s sitters’ book in December 1903.

Alexandrine died, unmarried, soon after her twenty-third birthday at the family’s summer residence in Baden bei Wien on 19 September 1924. Her brother Egon (born 1892) inherited the present portrait from his mother who fled to Rome in 1938 following the German occupation of Austria. His property was confiscated by the Gestapo in 1941.^[1]

CWS 2008