Philip de László
Philip de László · Arts & Literature
Portraitiste des cours d'Europe : il peignit le pape Léon XIII, l'empereur François-Joseph, cinq souverains britanniques et quelque quatre mille portraits, dont ceux de Theodore Roosevelt et de Franklin Roosevelt
30 avril 1869, Budapest — 22 novembre 1937, Londres
Hongrie, Autriche, Royaume-Uni
Philip de László is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Portraitiste des cours d'Europe : il peignit le pape Léon XIII, l'empereur François-Joseph, cinq souverains britanniques et quelque quatre mille portraits, dont ceux de Theodore Roosevelt et de Franklin Roosevelt
Origins and early life
Philip de László was born Fülöp Laub in Budapest on 30 April 1869, the eldest son of Adolf and Johanna Laub, a Jewish tailor and seamstress of very modest means; he was born and raised a Jew, changed the family name from Laub to László in 1891, and this fiche states plainly that as an adult he converted to Catholicism, in 1900, at the time of his marriage to Lucy Guinness, of the Irish brewing family, whose relatives had opposed the match for years on grounds of religion and class.
He was apprenticed to a photographer at eleven, studied at the Budapest academy, then in Munich and at the Académie Julian in Paris, and won the grand gold medal at the Paris exposition of 1900 for a portrait of Pope Leo XIII, painted from life in the Vatican.
Work and career
From that moment the courts of Europe sat to him. He painted the Emperor Franz Joseph, the German Kaiser, the kings of Spain, Bulgaria, Norway and Greece, five successive British sovereigns or heirs, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt, and some four thousand sitters in all, working fast, from life, with a loaded brush and a gift for catching a face in movement rather than in state. He settled in London in 1907 and was naturalized British in 1914.
This fiche notes plainly what followed: in 1917, at the height of anti-foreign feeling, he was interned for twelve months on suspicion of contact with the enemy through his Hungarian relatives, and cleared entirely in 1919; the episode broke his health. He died in London on 22 November 1937, and his catalogue is now maintained by an archive trust that has documented more than four thousand works.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: The de László Archive Trust, catalogue raisonné ; National Portrait Gallery, Londres ; Duff Hart-Davis, Philip de László: His Life and Art (2010)
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Portraitiste des cours d'Europe : il peignit le pape Léon XIII, l'empereur François-Joseph, cinq souverains britanniques et quelque quatre mille portraits, dont ceux de Theodore Roosevelt et de Franklin Roosevelt
Source: The de László Archive Trust, catalogue raisonné ; National Portrait Gallery, Londres ; Duff Hart-Davis, Philip de László: His Life and Art (2010)
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