DLA099-0067  Translation

‘A quarter of an hour with the painter of Kings and Queens. Mr. Philip A. de László, M.V.O.’, La Semaine Egyptienne, 28 February 1929

[Reproductions of the portrait of H.M. the Queen of the Belgians [7870] and of the portrait of Princess Alice of Athlone [2447]]

The Hall of [the hotel] Sémiramis.

The illustrious painter of Queens and Kings has given us an appointment for 6 o’clock. The maître d’hôtel warns us that, kept by an “important person”, the “portraitist of crowned heads” will be slightly late.

A respectable gentleman in a tuxedo, pink complexion, silver hair, with a pickwickian air, approaches us:
“Are you waiting for Professor László”?

Our interlocutor pronounces with veneration those august syllables; but we belong to a town in which the musicians of the opera count no less than forty professors, and of orchestra; this word “professor” to which the old gentleman lends a heavy glory, does not impress us anymore. We keep our composure to answer positively. The Little Old Man^[1] then examines us with envy; but he does not add a word (great passions are speechless) and we wait, whilst an excellent violinist, also a professor, no doubt, plays the “Musical Moment”.

But here is the Master! Medium height, bald, round head, whiskers, light eye, the allure of a pandour: Mr László owes to his Magyar origin this likeness with the knights of Arpad. A red and gold steward follows him, holding an enormous sign.

Mr László gives us his hand. We shake it with emotion, this dextrous one, which put on canvas so many aristocratic personages, without compromising himself by painting peasants.

To our request, Mr László agrees to give us some recollections of his splendid career.

—It was in Paris, he says, that I perfected the art of painting, the foundations of which I had learnt in Budapest, my birth town. I was the pupil of Benjamin Constant and Lefebvre who taught me how one catches a likeness and how one uses tones and values the most skilfully without wasting colour. It was in Paris that I had my first great success, with the portrait of Prince Hohenlohe, former Chancellor of the German Empire [4485], a portrait that won the gold medal at the 1899 Salon. I still have many friends in Paris.

And Mr László talks with warmth about his “great friend” Mr Dézarrois, who has just been appointed^[2] something important at the administration of the Fine Arts in France.