110715

Frau Louis Friedmann, née Rose von Rosthorn c. 1906

Head and shoulders in profile to the left, face turned towards the viewer in three-quarter profile her hair up in a chignon; a white evening dress, a large pearl earring and pearl choker loosely painted, all against a dark brown background

Oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm (23 ⅝ x 19 ⅝ in.)^[1] 

Private Collection

The present portrait of Rose Friedmann, née von Rosthorn, and Klimt’s portrait of her from 1900 both show the sitter wearing the same hairstyle and pearl choker. Around 1900 de László had got to know and started painting portraits of members of the Wittgenstein, Oser,^[2] Kestranek and Kupelwieser families, who moved in the same circle as the Friedmanns, but the present portrait probably dates from 1906. In a letter to de László dated 17 May 1906^[3] the sitter’s husband Louis Friedmann asks the artist for his terms if he were to paint him and his wife or individual portraits of them both, but the tone of the letter suggests Friedmann had been somewhat frustrated in his attempts to contact the artist concerning the commission. Explaining the formality of his letter, he writes: “We business people must be precise and punctual and expect the same from other business people but we do not hold it against an artist if he is unpunctual.” According to the present owner, the present painting was a preliminary sketch given to the family by the artist as a substitute for a finished three-quarter length portrait that was “lost in the post”. This, however, remains untraced and it is possible that neither a finished portrait of Rose Friedmann nor of her husband was actually carried out.

Although the present portrait was cut down in the 1970s to remove “badly painted hands” (originally resting on her lap), the present owner believes the painting was unsigned as his mother would never have removed a piece of canvas showing a signature. If this is the case it shows great confidence in the Friedmanns on de László’s part for whom a work unsigned usually implied dissatisfaction. In December 1909 Vilmos Kestranek [111270] wrote to de László that Rose Friedmann had asked him recently “whether you didn’t make more sketches of her, because she remembers seeing a different sketch to the one you gave her daughter.”^[4] Enclosed with the letter was one from Rose’s daughter which she had sent to Kestranek with the request he forward it to de László in London. This letter is unfortunately missing. No other sketches have been traced and it would appear that the present portrait is the one given by de László to Rose’s daughter as it has remained in the family. Another portrait of Rose Friedmann by Viktor Scharf^[5] remains in the same collection.

Rose Friedmann was born in Praevali (now in Slovenia) on 12 February 1864, the daughter of the industrialist Adolf von Rosthorn and his wife Rosalie, née Fischer. Rose’s great-grandfather, Matthew Rosthorn,^[6] had moved to Austria from Preston in Lancashire in 1765 to manufacture uniform buttons at the request of the Empress Maria Theresia. He was ennobled in 1790. In 1792 he founded a rolling mill at Fahrafeld in Lower Austria. His son August^[7] moved the business to nearby Oed an der Piesting as a brass rolling mill and wire factory in 1816. From this it developed, with the acquisition of iron and coal deposits in Carinthia in the 1830s, into a major metalworking industry, particularly in southern Austria and Slovenia.

Rose married first the lawyer Bruno Wagner (later Wagner von Freynsheim), with whom she had a daughter, Dora,^[8] in 1885. They divorced later that year. Rose was a pioneering mountaineer and it was while on a climbing tour that she met Louis Friedmann, whom his childhood friend the playwright Arthur Schnitzler described as “an alpinist with a reputation [extending] far beyond the borders of his fatherland.”^[9] In 1886 Louis and Rose married.

Louis Philippe Friedmann was born in Paris in 1861, the eldest son of the inventor and engineering works founder Alexander Friedmann. The Friedmanns were enthusiastic patrons of the arts, and especially of those artists of the Secession. According to Marie-Theres Arnbom, through their commissioning works rather than making donations they “took up a stand for a particular direction in art, in painting, in architecture and thereby helped artists considerably more to gain recognition and hence further commissions.”^[10] Around 1900 Gustav Klimt was commissioned to paint Rose, which may have occasioned Alma Mahler to write “by the way, for not so long he [Klimt] has been having an affair with Rose Friedmann, with that old frump! He takes wherever he finds.”^[11] When Klimt’s portrait was exhibited in March 1901, the art-critic Franz Servaes described the 36-year-old Rose as a lady “no longer in the first flush of youth but in whom an unfettered vitality quivers.”^[12] 

Rose and Louis Friedmann had one daughter Marie Alexandrine (born 1887), who married in 1908 Baron Oskar Vesque von Püttlingen. Following their divorce she married in 1911 Géza Satzger von Bálványos. His mother Elisabeth Josefa Satzger von Bálványos was also painted by de László in 1906 [110714], which portrait remains in the same collection as the present one. Louis Friedmann’s brother Max and his daughters were painted by de László’s “successor” in Vienna John Quincy Adams in 1908.

At the outbreak of the First World War Rose volunteered as a nurse but developed typhus in a field hospital. After a long and painful struggle she died of the fever on 13 January 1919, a month before her fifty-fifth birthday. On her death Hugo von Hofmannsthal, another close friend of the family, wrote a long letter to Louis describing Rose’s beauty, intelligence and warmth. At this time Louis sold their house in the Jacquingasse in the third district of Vienna and moved to a “bachelor villa” in the nineteenth which he was forced to sell for a pittance after the arrival of the Germans in 1938. A few months later, on 1 April 1939, Louis died in Vienna.

LITERATURE:        

•DLA068-0139, letter from Louis Friedmann to de László, 17 May 1906

•DLA031-0082, letter from Wilhelm Kestranek to de László, 21 December 1909

CWS 2005