4599

Baron François Rodolphe d’Erlanger 1902

Head and shoulders, head turned and looking down to the right, wearing a blue jacket with a yellow lining over a white shirt

Oil on canvas, 52 x 44.5 cm (20 ½ x 17 ½ in.), cut down from original size to fit present frame

Inscribed lower left: 902 / László   

Private Collection

In this portrait de László is said to have captured the very essence of Baron d’Erlanger, so much so that his son Leo often said that the present portrait was not like his father, but that it was his father.  

According to the descendants of the sitter, the portrait was sent for re-framing when the family was living in Tunis on its return was found to have been cut down. Considering its visibility, the careful signature was most probably added by de László at a later date, as he did for the duc de Gramont when his two family group portraits were divided up, see [8752].

Baron François Rodolphe d’Erlanger was born in Paris on 8 June 1872. He was the fourth, and third surviving, son of Baron Frederic Emile d'Erlanger [111230] and his wife Mathilde Slidell d'Erlanger, originally from New Orleans, daughter of John Slidell, the Commissioner for the Confederacy in Paris at the court of Napoleon III.  He had an elder brother, Emile [4341] and two younger brothers, Frederic and Raphael. On 19 June 1897, in London, he married Countess Elisabetta (Bettina) Mattilda Maria-Scolastica Cleofee [4603], daughter of Count Barbiellini-Amidei-Lelmi, Chamberlain to Pope Leo XIII. Together they had one son, Leo, who was named after his godfather, the Pope.  

Rodolphe d’Erlanger declared that he did not wish to become a merchant banker like his father and elder brothers, and entered instead the world of painting and music. He also dedicated himself to the preservation of Arab craftsmanship. He studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, becoming an extremely competent artist and writer. He published the Histoire de la Musique Arabe (six volumes), in Paris between 1930 and 1959, which remains the standard work on Arab music. Suffering from emphysema, he settled in North Africa at the turn of the century, where he hoped the climate would benefit his health. He built a magnificent palace in Tunisia, just outside Sid-bou-Said, carved into a hillside overlooking the Mediterranean. The land was purchased for him by his wife, and the palace, which he called Ennejma Ezzahra (Star of Venus), constructed between 1909 and 1921. However he died of lung cancer in October 1932 in Tunis, aged only sixty.

De László first met Baron and Baroness Rodolphe in Paris in 1899.^[1] They were, as a family, very considerable early patrons, and became long-standing and loyal friends of the artist. The sitter’s elder brother, Baron Emile and his wife Catherine de Robert d’Aqueria de Rochegude [4352], were also painted on several occasions. In addition he painted two portraits and made a number of drawings of the present sitter’s daughter-in-law, Mrs. Leo d’Erlanger [4609]. Such was the closeness of the patron to the painter that Baron Rodolphe apparently assisted the artist in the completion of his portrait of Pope Leo XIII [4509] in 1900 by sitting to him for the hands and robes. De László’s biographer, Owen Rutter, records their meeting in Rome in 1900, while he was painting the Pope.

PROVENANCE:

By descent in the sitter’s family

LITERATURE:

•Field, Katherine ed., Transcribed by Susan de Laszlo, The Diaries of Lucy de László Volume I: (1890-1913), de Laszlo Archive Trust, 2019, p. 62

CC 2008