3544

Countess Bathurst, née the Honourable Lilias Margaret Frances Borthwick 1919

Half-length slightly to the right, full face to the viewer, wearing a salmon pink stole trimmed with dark fur, over a white and green evening gown, four strands of pearls around her neck, pearl earrings, and a gold brooch at her breast

Oil on canvas, 88.9 x 63.5 cm (35 x 25 in.)

Inscribed lower left: de László / 1919. Oct.

Laib L9588(930) / C2(16A)  Lady Bathurst

NPG Album 1917-21, f. 76

Sitters’ Book II, f. 12: Lilias Bathurst Oct. 22. 1919

Private Collection

This portrait was commissioned by the Morning Post as a gift to Countess Bathurst’s son, Lord Apsley, on the occasion of his wedding. The paper had been owned by the Bathurst family since 1908. The sitter had very firm ideas about her portrait and conveyed her wishes to de László ahead of her sittings in October : “I think for the picture of myself I should prefer one of the blue frames with gold scroll work. Spanish, I think you said they were, and please I should like my portrait to be very much smaller. there is so little room in the house - I really prefer just a head & shoulders & can you do me under life size because otherwise I know that all my friends will say as they have said of every photograph or portrait of me hitherto, “yes, but it give one the idea of a large woman, which you are not.” One gets so tired of hearing that sort of criticism.”^[1] The artist was not in the habit of being dictated to by his sitters and he chose to paint his sitter half-length in a gold frame.

Countess Bathurst does not seem to have taken offence and wrote to de László: “I cannot wait till the picture arrives to thank you most sincerely for it … I do realise all the concentration, the genius you put into it; the immense trouble you took, to make it exactly what you intended it to be – a masterpiece. Also your generosity in giving us, instead of the slight sketch, which the Morning Post’s gift to Apsley was intended to be, one of your most finished works. Moreover, I am personally grateful, because in that picture you have painted my best self, all that I should like always to be. There is another and a disagreeable side to me, but your picture will, better than any sermon, tell me that it is foolish to worry and that it’s best to keep smiling at all the troubles and tracasseries of life.”^[2]

A letter to de László from Henry Peacock, Manager of the Morning Post, shows that the commission for the portrait was £300, reflecting the artist’s normal fee for a study portrait rather than a finished half-length.^[3]   

Countess Bathurst wrote to the artist once again when her portrait, and that of her son [2023], had arrived at her home Cirencester Park: “The pictures are immensely admired. The frames are perfect also, although they have been changed - that is the gold one should have been for Apsley’s picture & the Spanish one for mine, but it does not matter, they look just as well as they are … My horrid Shannon one has gone into the passage & Barbara Duchess of Cleveland by Lely has come back & now the room is as I wanted it to be. As for my picture everyone admires it, the painting, the colouring, the resemblance - in fact nobody even said it wasn’t like me which they always did if a photograph or a miniature of mine was shown them … My husband asks me to say again what pleasure the pictures give him. He is a true lover of good pictures.”^[4] 

De László painted ten portraits of members of the Bathurst family: the sitter’s husband [3541], their daughter Meriel [4535][4536][4539], their son Lord Apsley [2023], his wife [3534][3537] and their two sons [3539] and the wife of their youngest son, née Helen Heathcoat-Amory [111090].

The present portrait, and those of Countess Bathurst’s son [2023] and daughter [4536], were exhibited at de László’s one-man show at the French Gallery in 1923. The sitter wrote to him: “Of course I cannot refuse but I said many swear words at the thought of losing your beautiful pictures at the only time of year I can enjoy them.”^[5] 

The Honourable Lilias Margaret Frances Borthwick was the only surviving child of Algernon Borthwick, 1st Baron Glenesk (1830-1908) and his wife Alice Beatrice Lister (1849-1898). On 15 November 1893 she married Seymour Henry, 7th Earl Bathurst, who had succeeded to the Earldom the previous year. There were four children of the marriage: Lady Meriel ( born 1894), Allen Algernon, Lord Apsley (born 1895), the Honourable William Ralph Seymour (born 1903) and the Honourable Ralph Henry (born 1904).

Countess Bathurst inherited The Morning Post, Britain’s oldest surviving daily newspaper (founded 1772) on the death of her father in 1908. In later years she described her principles as loyalty to the crown, to the church, and to every cause which was honourable and right. In practice this meant that the Morning Post was imperialist, protectionist, intransigent about Irish nationalism, strong on military matters, and against female suffrage. Readership declined during the First World War and continued to do so until the paper was sold to a consortium in 1924, with whom the Duke of Northumberland was associated.^[6]

Countess Bathurst supported the war effort during the First World War by nursing and volunteering her home, Bathurst House in Belgrave Square, as a twenty-nine bed military convalescent hospital.^[7] After visiting France in 1920 she founded The British League of Help for the Devastated Areas of France. The League wrote to Mayors across Britain urging them to adopt towns and villages affected by the war and as a result about eighty towns and cities did so. She was awarded the medal of Queen Elizabeth of Belgium and was made an Officer of the Legion of Honour of France.

Countess Bathurst survived her son, who was killed during the Second World War, and her husband who died in 1943. She died 30 December 1965 at her home, The Cranhams, Cirencester.

PROVENANCE:

Commissioned by the Morning Post, as a wedding present to her son Lord Apsley;

By descent in the family;

Sold Christie’s 2020

EXHIBITED:

•The French Gallery, London, A Series of Portraits and Studies by Philip A. de Laszlo, M.V.O., June 1923, no. 37

LITERATURE:

•Rutter, Owen, Portrait of a Painter, London, 1939, pp. 343-44

•Hart-Davis, Duff, in collaboration with Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, De László: His Life and Art, Yale University Press, 2010, pp. 176-177, ill. 98

•Hart-Davis, Duff, László Fülöp élete és festészete [Philip de László's Life and Painting], Corvina, Budapest, 2019, ill.  123

•DLA055-0086, letter from Countess Bathurst to de László, 29 August 1919  

•DLA055-0092, letter from Countess Bathurst to de László, 24 November 1919  

•DLA055-0084, letter from Henry Peacock to de László, 3 December 1919  

•DLA106-0105, letter from Countess Bathurst to de László, 20 May 1923  

KF 2020