11611

Academic work

Portrait drawing

A Young Girl 1887

Head-and-shoulders, full-face, looking down to the left, wearing a cream shirt with round lace collar

Pencil and charcoal heightened with white on paper, 46 x 35.6 cm (18 ⅛ x 14 in.)

Inscribed lower right: László F / 878 Szept / A modell elmaradása miatt / nem készült el [The picture is unfinished as the model did not turn up]

Laib L5404 (364) / C30 (31)  

Private Collection

This drawing is one of the earliest signed and dated by de László. It was his first portrait drawing from life, made in September 1887, when he was just eighteen and a relatively new student at the Mintarajziskola (School for Model Drawing, later the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest). According to his first biographer, Otto von Schleinitz, it was the success of this first drawing that put de László immediately into the painting class of the great Károly Lotz.^[1] 

PROVENANCE: 

In the possession of the artist on his death

EXHIBITED:         

•Christie’s, King Street, London, A Brush with Grandeur, 6-22 January 2004, no. 1        

LITERATURE:          

•Schleinitz, Otto (von), Künstler Monographien, no. 106, Ph A. von László, Bielefeld and Leipzig (Velhagen & Klasing), 1913, ill. p. 5

•Rutter, Owen, Portrait of a Painter, Hodder and Stoughton, 1939, ill. facing p. 32

•Clifford, Derek, The Paintings of P.A. de Laszlo, London 1969, monochrome ill. pl. 2            

•De Laszlo, Sandra, ed., & Christopher Wentworth-Stanley, asst. ed., A Brush with Grandeur, Paul Holberton publishing, London 2004, p. 67, ill.

•Hart-Davis, Duff, in collaboration with Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, De László: His Life and Art, Yale University Press, 2010, ill. 3

•Hart-Davis, Duff, László Fülöp élete és festészete [Philip de László's Life and Painting], Corvina, Budapest, 2019, ill. 3

CWS 2003