3558

UNFINISHED

Jean Penelope Balfour 1922

Bust length to the left, head turned full face to the viewer, wearing a white blouse with blue ribbon in her dark hair, against a red background

Oil on board, 24.6 x 21.3 cm (9 ¾ x 8 ¼ in.)

Inscribed lower right: unfinished / de László / 1922

Sitters’ Book II, f. 31: Nemone Balfour at Dawyck / June 28th

Private Collection

De László has inscribed this portrait as unfinished and painted a second head study on an identical size board [3554]. The fact that he has signed the work and presented it to the family suggests that, rather than a formal commission, they were painted and given in friendship while the artist was staying with the family at Dawyck, their Scottish estate. The artist also painted Frederick Balfour [3547], the sitter’s father, during that visit. The sitter’s mother Gertrude was painted in 1920 [2139] and her brother Alastair in 1931 [3551].

De László mentioned the sitter in his diary some nine years later, after his wife Lucy had stayed with the family at Dawyck: “Nemone & son [her brother Alastair] back from the U.S. where they spent 7 month[s] she hoping to find a millionaire husband but man [sic] are afraid of this clever, able – manly girl who has already amused herself so much – but all parents in our days have their difficulties with their young.”^[1] He mentioned her again in 1934, after attending lunch at the Balfour’s London home, in connection with Baron Franckenstein, who de László painted in 1925 [111060] and 1935 [5121] [5122]: “Do they hope Fran[c]kenstein will be interested in Nemeny? [sic] poor fran[c]kenstein – I hope not!”^[2]

Jean Penelope ‘Nemone’ Balfour was born 27 May 1906, the only daughter of Colonel Frederick Balfour of Dawyck and his wife Gertrude Norman. She was known as Nemone, rather than Jean Penelope which her elder brother could not pronounce. On 13 August 1937 in London, she married Arno Gurewitsch (1902-1974), a physician from Zurich who practiced and taught at the Columbia‐Presbyterian Medical Center. Jean and Arno had a daughter, Grania (born 1940). He was the doctor and close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt after the death of her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 and until her death in 1967. The marriage ended in divorce and on 30 December 1958 Jean married Seymour Palestin (1914-1999) of New York.

The sitter died in New York 11 September 1989.

PROVENANCE:

Frederick Balfour, father of the sitter;

By descent in the family

LITERATURE:

László, Philip de, 1931 Diary, private collection  

László, Philip de, 1934 Diary, private collection

KF 2021