9003

After Work – Girl With a Wheelbarrow 1896

A young girl wearing traditional Hungarian dress, a dark skirt and white blouse, seated full length on a wheelbarrow full of hay, looking over her right shoulder, her chin resting on her right wrist, her left hand on her right knee, in a landscape

Oil on canvas, 97 x 70.5 cm, (37 ¾  x 27 ½ in.) 

Inscribed lower left: László F. / 1896  D.

Private Collection

Philip de László known primarily as one of the leading international portrait painters of the early 20th century. At the beginning of his career he established a reputation in his native Hungary as a genre painter following the example of Mihály Munkácsy, who had managed to infuse a blossoming nationalist school of Hungarian painting with the influence of French artists such as Corot and Millet. De László himself studied at the Académie Julian in Paris 1890-91, where he came under the direct influence of the plein-air painters.

Despite initial success with genre works by the mid-1890s, de László wrote in his memoirs published after his death, “the need of money and my ardent desire to help my people compelled me to paint various portraits for 400 or 500 Florins, a sum which meant much to me in those days!”^[1] In fact it was the commission to paint the Bulgarian royal family in 1894 [3937] & [3715] which launched the young artist into circles far removed from country life, and although he remained an ardent Hungarian all his life, he later wrote “Once I had lived outside Hungary I found it difficult to sympathise with my fellow countrymen’s narrow and oriental view of life.”^[2]

In 1895 de László painted At Vesper Bell [11601], showing a young girl and an old man praying after a long day working in the fields. This was purchased by the Hungarian National Gallery the following year, but the present work, with a similar theme and entitled After Work by the artist, was one of the last such that he painted before turning exclusively to portraiture. The year 1896 was a busy one for the artist as portrait commissions took up more of his time. The present work was painted “for myself,”^[3] in August 1896 at Domony, the country house near Budapest of the Secretary to the Ministry of Justice, Dr Zsigmond László (no relation to the artist), while de László was completing commissioned portraits of his host [13399] and his son [110970] and at the same time giving his host lessons in painting.

As with At Vesper Bell, with its high view point and sharp naturalism, After Work shows a strong affinity to the work Jules Bastien-Lepage, an artist who greatly influenced many Hungarian painters at the time, such as Simon Hollósy and Béla Iványi Grünwald. Nevertheless the concentration of attention on the girl's eyes is a characteristic of de László's portraiture evident throughout his career. Apart from a single unfinished picture of a widow with her children [8984], painted following a stay in Brittany in 1902, de László was never to attempt this kind of subject matter again. Much later in his life, however, he did turn to landscape painting, and several small, quick sketches [4547] & [10485], painted for his own pleasure in those later years, refer back to his early days working in the Hungarian countryside.

PROVENANCE:

Offered at auction at BÁV, Budapest, 1954;

Known to have been in Hungary in 1969;

Offered at auction at Kieselbach Gallery and Auction House, Budapest, 16 December 2005, lot 43;

Offered at auction at Dorotheum, Vienna, 16 October 2012, lot 155;

Sold at auction at BÁV, Budapest, 7 December 2022, lot 312

EXHIBITED:

•Nemzeti Szalon, Budapest, Rendkívüli kiállítás [Special Exhibition], 1897, no. 34

LITERATURE:          

•Rutter, Portrait of a Painter, London, 1939, p. 152

•Clifford, Derek, The Paintings of P. A. de Laszlo, Literary Services & Production Ltd., London, 1969, ill. pl. 12

•Hart-Davis, Duff, in collaboration with Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, De László: His Life and Art, Yale University Press, 2010, ill. 17

•NSzL150-0035, letter from de László to Elek Lippich, 2 October 1896

•NSzL149-0001, letter from de László to Lajos Ernst, 26 December 1897

We are grateful to Mr. Tamás Kieselbach for drawing this picture to our attention

CWS 2017