5383

Ricardo Bartolomé Green Devoto 1927

Standing full-length slightly to the right, looking full face to the viewer, wearing a frilled yellow and white shirt, mustard velvet trousers and buckled black patent shoes, holding a beagle hound on a leash with his left hand, a small hunting whip in his right, all against a landscape background

Oil on canvas, 135 x 95 cm (53 x 37 ½ in.)

Inscribed lower left: de László / PARIZ (sic) 1927

Sitters’ Book II, f. 57: Rosita et Ricardito Green / Paris 27 Nov. 1927^[1] 

Private Collection

The present portrait is understood to have been commissioned by the sitter’s grandmother, Juana González de Devoto, after she saw de László’s portrait of Hugh Astor as a boy [2606] exhibited with a number of his other pictures at the French Gallery, London, in 1927. De László’s secretary noted in correspondence with the French Gallery that he had made arrangements with Mme. Devoto for “two or three portraits of the grandchildren,” but was uncertain as to the desired size of the portrait and the honorarium the Gallery had quoted to her.^[2] “Madame Devoto was very much interested in the portrait of Major Astor’s son,” wrote Harry Wallis, of Messrs. Wallis & Son of the French Gallery, to the artist, “and we mentioned that your honorarium for this would be one thousand guineas; we suggested, however, that she should leave in your hands both the size and the style.”^[3] 

The present portrait is compositionally and stylistically very similar to that of the five year old Hugh Astor. Both are highly influenced by children’s portraiture of the 18th century and particularly show de László’s admiration for Sir Thomas Lawrence and Henry Raeburn. Lawrence’s influence is more specific in de László’s pendant to the present portrait. The sitter’s sister, María Devoto [110544] can be directly compared to one of that artist’s most famous works, ‘Pinkie,’ now in the Huntington Collection. The artist’s wife mentions both portraits in her diary, 28 November 1927: “Went to Studio & met Mr & Mrs Green, Argentines – nice – Their two children have been painted  - lovely – Little girl of 6 painted in white frock holding a pink hat & pink sach – She has red hair.”^[4]

There exist several preparatory drawings in sepia chalk for this portrait, among them [5394] and [5395], which remain in a private collection. De László also painted two of the Devoto children’s maternal aunts, María Teresa Devoto González [4880] and María Juana Devoto González [4877].

Ricardo Bartolomé Green Devoto was born in 1920, the son of Ricardo Green Mayobre and María Rosa Devoto González. For biographical notes on the sitter’s grandparents, see [4880]. The sitter inherited Arroyo Dulce,^[5] an estancia of some 49,000 acres which his maternal grandfather had acquired in 1878 in the Pergamino district, about 125 miles from Buenos Aires. In the 1950s he imported Canadian Holstein bulls, flying them in to found a dairy herd on the estancia. He married Silvia Elvira Videla Méndes (born c. 1921), daughter of Carlos María Videla Álvarez de Toledo and Raquel Méndes Gonçalves Fernández Ramos. They had one daughter, Silvia Green Videla (born c. 1942), to whom, the estancia passed on his death.^[6]

LITERATURE:

•Queiroz, Juan Pablo, & Elia, Tomás de, eds., Argentina: The Great Estancias, Rizzoli, New York, 1995, p. 102, ill.

•DLA107-0111, letter from de László to Messrs. Wallis & Son, The French Gallery, 9 September 1927

•DLA107-0110, letter from Harry Wallis (Messrs. Wallis & Son, The French Gallery) to de László, 12 September 1927

•László, Lucy de, 1927 diary, private collection

SMdeL 2012