10856

DESTROYED

Study portrait

Don Alfonso de Borbón y Battenberg, Prince of Asturias 1910

Head and shoulders to the left, in semi profile looking to the viewer, wearing a white shirt with a wide collar, the Order of the Golden Fleece hung on a ribbon round his neck.

Oil [support and dimensions unknown]

Indistinctly inscribed lower right: P.A. László / Madrid / [Escorial?]

This portrait was painted during de László’s first visit to Spain, when the sitter’s mother and father, King Alfonso XIII [7925] and Queen Victoria Eugenia [7933], were also painted. According to the sitter’s niece the portrait was destroyed in 1991 in a fire at the Torlonia Palace in Rome, the home of the sitter’s sister, Doña Beatriz.

In her journal, Lucy de László recorded her first impression of the young Prince of Asturias, on the occasion of a tea party “in the honour of Sauer’s^[1] playing to [the Queen]. The young Queen, Press Henry of Battenberg^[2] & the 2 Infanta’s present.^[3] S. played splendidly.  In the middle of first part, the doors were thrown open, & in came the little Prince of Asturia[s].  All in white & slick fair hair, light eyes & good shoulders.  He came over to his mother.” ^[4]

It seems the present portrait was one of the last de László executed during his 1910 trip. Lucy recorded that de László completed it on 14 April: “We went into the Studio - What P. has done is wonderful! That same aft: he had finished the Prince with “Fliess” [Order of the Golden Fleece] hung round him on a red ribbon. A sweet pic, life itself, in the frame I had spotted in a Curiosity Shop. We all said P. had better not touch it again. The Queen thought so too. She said his head is just the shape of his father’s high forehead & small behind the ears.”^[5] 

It was de László’s habit to paint his portraits in frames he had chosen, as he considered they were essential to the overall conception of the work of art. It seems Lucy made her contribution in this instance. A poor photograph of the portrait in situ, before it was destroyed, would suggest that the frame she chose was a wide black Spanish frame.  

For biographical notes on the sitter, see [8004]

PROVENANCE:          

Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain, mother of the sitter,^[6] until her death in 1969;

By descent to the Infanta doña Beatriz, the sitter’s sister

EXHIBITED:          

•Thos. Agnew & Sons, London, On Behalf of the Artists’ General  Benevolent Institution.  Exhibition of Portraits by Philip A. László, M.V.O., May-June, 1911, no. 27  

LITERATURE:  

•Schleinitz, O. von. Künstler Monographien, Vol. 106, Ph. A. von László, Bielefeld & Leipzig, 1913, ill. p. 111, pl. 124

•Hart-Davis, Duff, in collaboration with Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, De László: His Life and Art, Yale University Press, 2010, p. 123

•García-Frías Checa, Carmen, ed., El Retrato en Las Colecciones Reales de Patrimonio Nacional de Juan de Flandes a Antonio López, 2015, ill. p. 469

•Field, Katherine ed., Transcribed by Susan de Laszlo, The Diaries of Lucy de László Volume I: (1890-1913), de Laszlo Archive Trust, 2019, p. 167, ill. pp. 166, 185

•László, Lucy de, 1902-1911 diary, private collection, pp. 159, 171-172

SMdeL