5407

Christian Hilda Guthrie 1935

Standing three-quarter length to the right, full-face looking to the viewer, wearing a blue tam o’shanter and a brown jacket over her white open-necked shirt and a tartan kilt, with a falcon perched on her left hand, its red feathered hood in her right hand, a stormy sky behind

Oil on canvas, 84.5 x 66 cm (33 ¼ x 26 in.)

Inscribed lower right: de László / 1935 I   

Laib L18552 (452) / C11 (20)  Master [sic] Guthrie

NPG 1935 Album, p. 8

Sitters’ Book II, opp. f. 81: Christian Guthrie January 9th 1935

Private Collection

This portrait was commissioned by the sitter’s mother, who had a fine collection of paintings. She also kept an aviary, which might account for the falcon in the picture. So far as is known de László included a bird in very few other portraits.

Christian Hilda Guthrie was born on 12 October 1924, the second of the two daughters of Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Douglas Guthrie, 20th of Guthrie Castle, Angus, and Kathleen Mona ‘Poppy,’ younger daughter of Colonel the Hon. George Gough. She was 12 when the present portrait was executed. Her mother was a prominent Irish Revivalist during the early years of the 20th Century and much involved in the artistic circles of Ireland at that time. On 22 July 1947, the sitter married James Silvester Rattray (born 1919) of Craighall-Rattray, Perthshire. Together they had five children. She died aged only thirty-nine on 16 October 1963.

EXHIBITED:

•Wildenstein & Co., Ltd., London, Exhibition of Paintings by Philip A. de László, M.V.O., In Aid of the London Hospital and The Artists’ General Benevolent Institution, November-December 1937, no. 14

•Christie’s, King Street, London, A Brush with Grandeur, 6-22 January 2004, no. 102

LITERATURE:

•De Laszlo, Sandra, ed. & Christopher Wentworth-Stanley, asst ed., A Brush with Grandeur, Paul Holberton publishing, London, 2004, p. 167, ill.

•László, Philip de, January-June 1935 diary, private collection, 24 January entry, p. 10 [pasted photograph of de László painting Christian Guthrie – inscribed by the artist: Christian Guthrie / sitting for her pic / in January 1935]

CWS 2008