5789

Study portrait

Mrs Herbert Hoover, née Lou Henry 1932

Half-length in profile to the left, three-quarter face, wearing a dark, low-necked dress and a long gold and pearl necklace

Oil on board, 71.2 x 48.3 cm (28 x 19 in.)

Inscribed lower right: de László / 1932

Sitters’ Book II, f. 71: Lou Henry Hoover Jan 5th 1932, [beneath the signature of her husband and Washington / President and Mrs. Hoover White House inscribed by the artist in pencil]

Private Collection

De László executed this portrait shortly after that of the sitter’s husband President Herbert Hoover [5787]. It was painted at the artist’s behest as a surprise for the President.^[1] After the sitter’s death in 1944, Hoover commissioned three copies of it from the artist Richard Marsden Brown. The first was given to the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University [112079]; the second was presented to the White House in 1957 [5796], where it still remains, and the third was for his elder son Herbert Hoover Jr [112078]. In 1965, a fourth copy, by Francis Stilwell Dixon, was commissioned (the former President having died in 1964) for the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in Iowa [5798].

The sitter visited the artist at his temporary studio at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and reminded him that she had visited him in his Campden Hill studio, London, in 1912.^[2] A contemporary article quotes the artist as stating that he liked the First Lady “enormously,” and praised her for the maintenance of a “beautiful” family life and serving as a “wonderful mistress of the White House. He found her much interested in art, literature and other expressions of culture.”^[3] A review of the 1932 exhibition at M. Knoedler & Co., New York, in which the present portrait was included, noted: “For $3,000 [de László] may consent to do a sketch, a little like the one of Mrs. Hoover, warm, sympathetic and technically graceful, but without too much detail. On Mrs. Hoover’s kind face matronly warmth was mingled with, but did not infringe upon, a hauteur fitting for her station.”^[4] 

Lou Henry Hoover was born on 29 March 1874 in Iowa, daughter of Charles Delano Henry and his wife Florence Ida Weed. The family moved to California when the sitter was 10 years old. She was a fine horsewoman and developed an enthusiasm for geology and mining. In 1894 she entered Stanford University as a geology student. There she met her future husband, Herbert Hoover, who was then a senior, though they were the same age. She graduated in 1898, and they married on 10 February 1899. They had two sons: Herbert Jr (born in 1903), and Allan (born 1907).

Herbert Hoover’s career as a mining engineer took them around the globe before he entered public service. Their first home after their marriage was in China and the sitter, who had an ear for languages, acquired fluent Chinese. She and her husband would later converse in this language in the White House to avoid being understood by eavesdroppers. She remains the only First Lady to have been be fluent in an Asian language. Mrs Hoover was also proficient in Latin and with her husband translated Agricola’s De Re Metallica, a 16th century encyclopedia of mining and metallurgy. Their text, published in 1912, is still in print as the standard English version.

During the First World War the Hoovers worked to provide relief for Belgian refugees, for which the sitter was decorated by King Albert I of the Belgians. On her husband’s appointment as Secretary of Commerce in 1921, the family settled in Washington, D.C. While he worked in the cabinets of Presidents Harding and Coolidge, she served as national president of the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. (1922-25). On Hoover’s election as President in 1929, she embarked on a programme of restoring and refurnishing rooms in the White House. The Hoovers entertained regularly, using their own private funds for social events while the country suffered worsening economic depression. In 1933 they retired to the home they had built in Palo Alto, California. She served a second term as President of the Girl Scouts from 1935 to 1937.

Mrs Hoover died suddenly of a heart attack in New York on 7 January 1944. Her husband, who survived her by twenty years, recalled that she had helped with the education “of a multitude of boys and girls” and that her life had been “a symbol of everything wholesome in American life.”

PROVENANCE:

Presented to Herbert Hoover by the artist, 1932;

By descent in the family

EXHIBITED:

•M. Knoedler and Co., New York, An Exhibition of Portraits by P. A. de László, M.V.O., 4-16 January 1932 (late addition, no catalogue number)

LITERATURE:

•The New York Times, Sunday 17 January 1932, ill.

•The Sunday Star, Washington, D.C., 17 January 1932, p. 14, ill.

•Mid-Week Pictorial, Vol. XXXIV, n˚ 23, week ending 23 January 1932, p. 6, ill.

•“Every Court But China,” Time Magazine, Volume XIX, No. 4 (25 January 1932), pp. 26-28

•“Philip de László Paints President and Mrs. Hoover,” Herald-Tribune, [date?], 1932, ill.

•Pryor, Helen Brenton, Lou Henry Hoover: Gallant First Lady, Dodd, Mead, 1969, p. 192

•Klapthor, Margaret B. The First Ladies, White House Historical Association, 1975, p. 71, ill. (1950 copy by Richard M. Brown)

•Sherwood, Deborah Jones, The First Ladies: Their Lives and Legacies, New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003, p. 131, ill. (1950 copy by Richard M. Brown)

•Hart-Davis, Duff, in collaboration with Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, De László: His Life and Art, Yale University Press, 2010, pp. 230, 231

•DLA103-0087, press cutting, “Portraits Added to Exhibition to Aid Unemployed,” New York Herald-Tribune, Wednesday, 13 January 1932, ill.

•DLA103-0016, press cutting, Los Angeles Times, 18 January 1932, ill.

•DLA103-0015, press cutting, Mid-Week Pictorial, New York, Vol. XXXIV, No. 23 (23 January 1932), ill.

•DLA162-0052, Pesti Hírlap, 3 May 1932, p. 6

•László, Philip de, 1931 diary, private collection

MD  2013