11628

Princess Nicholas of Greece and Denmark, née Grand Duchess Elena Vladimirovna 1914

Seated three-quarter length to the right, full face to the viewer, wearing a black gown trimmed with lace at the sleeves, a pearl and gold choker and a two-stranded pearl necklace with a crucifix on a long chain round her neck, a tiara adorned with a large sapphire upon her head, a fan in her left hand resting in her lap, a vase of flowers to her right, the linked coats of arm of Denmark and Russia in the top right corner

Oil on canvas, 161.3 x 102.9 cm (63 ½ x 40 ⅝ in.)

Inscribed lower left: P.A. de László. Athens 1914 . IV. 

Sitters’ Book I, f. 96: Helene / Prinzessin von Griechenland / Grossfurstin von Russland / Athen, April 1914^[1]

Private Collection

De László painted more than fifty portraits of the British and Greek Royal Families between 1907 and 1935. This portrait was painted in Athens in 1914, where the artist was invited to paint members of the Greek Royal Family by King Constantine I [11591]. He made a head and shoulders study [9855] of the Princess in preparation for the present portrait and remarked that: “her features were of that type which we have come to associate with the House of Romanoff.”^[2] 

The portrait was still being paid for after the First World War. A letter from the secretary of the sitter’s husband, Prince Nicholas, shows de László’s honorarium was 10,000 francs and in December 1920 he received a part payment of 150 guineas.^[3]   

Grand Duchess Elena of Russia was born on 12 January 1882, the daughter of Grand Duke Vladimir, son of Tsar Alexander II, and his wife Princess Maria of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Prince Felix Yussopov, notorious as the murderer of Rasputin, claimed in his memoirs that he had been in love with Elena for years. “Her beauty fascinated me,” he wrote, “she had the loveliest eyes imaginable and everyone fell under their charm.”^[4] At Tsarskoye Selo, 29 August 1902 she married Prince Nicholas of Greece [11628], the third son of George I, King of the Hellenes and Queen Olga [11592]. There were three daughters of the marriage: Olga [11684], who married Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, Elizabeth, who married Count Karl Törring-Jettenbach, and Marina [5928], who married George, Duke of Kent [5952].

In 1917 Prince Nicholas and his wife followed his brother, King Constantine, into exile in Switzerland before they could return to Greece in 1920.  In 1923 they moved to Paris with their daughters where Princess Nicholas was involved in charitable activities, particularly supporting child refugees from the Russian Revolution. They returned to Greece in 1935, where Prince Nicholas died suddenly of a heart attack in 1938. Princess Nicholas refused to leave during the German occupation, preferring to remain near her husband’s tomb. She died in Athens in 1957.

PROVENANCE:  

Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, daughter of the sitter

EXHIBITED:

•M. Knoedler & Company, Inc., London, Royal Portraits by Philip A. de László, M.V.O., Loan Exhibition In aid of The Wedding Gift Fund for St. George’s Hospital (at the special request of H.R.H. The Duke of Kent), November-December, 1934, no. 9

•Hotel Jean Charpentier, Paris, Exposition P. A. de László, June 1931, no. 9

•Christie’s, King Street, London, A Brush with Grandeur, 6-22 January, 2004. no. 59, ill.

LITERATURE:

•Greece, Prince Nicholas of, & Tkpedka ed., My Fifty Years, London, 1926, pp. 253, 254

•Wedding Present List of the Duke of Kent and Princess Marina, 29 November 1934, no. 1047

•The Illustrated London News, 1 December 1934, p. 867, ill.

•Apollo, Vol. 21, January 1935, p. 51, ill.

•Hoven, Baroness Helena von der, Intimate Life Story of H.R.H. the Duchess of Kent, Ed. Cassell, 1937, pp. 6, 7        

•Markenzinis, Styros, A Political History of Contemporary Greece, Volume II 1922-1924, Athens 1974, p. 271

•Tantzos, Nicholas Ed., The Inheritors of Alexander the Great, Atlantic International Publications, 1986, p. 189

•Greece, Prince Michael of, & Alan Palmer, The Royal House of Greece, London, 1990, p. 70 ill.

•Vickers, Hugo, Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece, London, 2000

•Munn, Geoffrey C., Tiaras. A History of Splendour, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2001, p. 184, ill. pl. 164

•Hart-Davis, Duff, in collaboration with Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, De László: His Life and Art, Yale University Press, 2010, pp. 138, 254, ill. 83

•Hart-Davis, Duff, László Fülöp élete és festészete [Philip de László's Life and Painting], Corvina, Budapest, 2019, ill. 105

•Field, Katherine ed., Gábor Bellák and Beáta Somfalvi, Philip de László (1869-1937); "I am an Artist of the World", Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, 2019, p. 10, ill.

•DLA077-0092, Secretary of Prince Nicholas of Greece to de László, 22 December 1920  

KF 2017