6184

CUT DOWN

Mrs Arthur Lee, née Ruth Moore 1908

Half-length, wearing a cream evening dress, a red embroidered evening jacket over her shoulders and a long string of pearls round her neck which she holds in her uplifted left hand, a stormy sky beyond

Oil on canvas, oval, 67.3 x 55.9 cm (26 ½ x 22 in.)

Sitters’ Book I, opp. f. 79: Ruth M. Lee-  Rookesbury Park Wickham – / October 25th 1907

Sitters’ Book I, f. 80: Ruth Lee August 3rd 1908 ^[1]

The Administrative Trustees of the Chequers Estate

This is the first and more formal of two portraits in oil that de László made of Lady Lee [6194]. When she died in 1966, Lady Lee bequeathed this picture to Chequers, where it remains to this day. It hangs in the Stone Hall, as was Arthur Lee’s wish.

The present work was originally three-quarter length and was cut down to the present oval, the reason unknown. The inscription and date disappeared when the format of the picture was altered, however, a sketch de László made of Lady Lee and a small dog in a pictorial visitors’ book [110689] gives several clues: it is inscribed “The Danger Woman,” presumably by the sitter,^[2] and after a nice debate / at my last supper - / at Glendoe Lodge / 1908 Aug 3 / P.A. László by the artist. The same page also bears the signature of Lucy de László, followed by “July 22nd - 29th. ”

Arthur Lee explains in his private papers: “By the end of July [1908] I had come to the end of my physical tether and, upon urgent medical advice, obtained leave from the Whips [in the House of Commons] to ‘pair’ for the rest of the session. We rented a Scotch shooting-lodge ‘Glendoe,’ with a good deer-forest and a grouse-moor, near Fort Augustus in Inverness-shire. There we stayed for three months.”^[3] This, together with the inscriptions in the Lees’ visitors’ book, would suggest that the de Lászlós arrived in Scotland almost at the same time, perhaps on the same day as their hosts.

On the page facing the above-mentioned sketch [110689], two photographs are pasted, one of Lord Lee with the artist and one of the present portrait before it was cut down, in its original frame. The original composition is very close to that of the sketch which was most certainly done during or after Lady Lee’s series of sittings. However, the significance of the dog and of the private joke implied by the surrounding inscriptions remains mysterious.

Ruth Moore was born in 1869, the eldest daughter of John Godfrey Moore (1847-1899), a railway magnate of New York, and Miriam Jane Aldrich (1853-1890). On 23 December 1899 she married Mr Arthur Lee, later M.P. for Fareham, who was created Baron Lee in 1918 and Viscount Lee of Fareham in 1922.  It was she and her sister Faith who purchased the Buckinghamshire country house Chequers in 1917, handing it immediately to Lee, who made arrangements to bequeath it to the nation for the use of future Prime Ministers. This plan was fulfilled in 1921, the Lees having no heirs.^[4] The sitter died in 1966.

PROVENANCE:                

•Bequeathed by the sitter to Chequers upon her death, 1966

LITERATURE:

•Lee, Arthur, A Good Innings: The Private Papers of Viscount Lee of Fareham, ed. by Alan Clark, John Murray, 1974, p. 97

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

•Major, Norma, Chequers, The Prime Minister’s Country House and Its History, Harper Collins Publishers, London 1996, p. 85, ill., pp. 116-7

•Field, Katherine ed., Transcribed by Susan de Laszlo, The Diaries of Lucy de László Volume I: (1890-1913), de Laszlo Archive Trust, 2019, p. 144, ill. pp. 109, 112

•László, Lucy de, 1908 diary, private collection, 23 July entry, p. 229

CC 2008