Philip de Laszlo: Settling in England

"Vamanrao Shankar Pandit
as an Indian Prince" by Philip de Laszlo

"Philip de Laszlo was now making over 2000 pounds a year in Austria alone. In 1905 the Vienna income tax authorities paid him the compliment of telling him that he was one of the most famous portrait painters in the world, and it was well known that he received anything between 150 to 400 pounds for a picture. But besides money he desired recognition, particularly recognition from Hungary, Germany and France. 

In Hungary he had friends with good connections in high places, including the daughter of General Gorgey, who had been working for his ennoblement since 1903. A German friend watched his interests in Berlin and made more than one attempt to remind the Emperor of his services to art; while in France Countess Jean de Castellane performed similar good offices, with the result that in 1905 he was created a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.

However, he had begun to feel that he needed more scope for his art - and more competition. England offered him antagonists worthy of his brush, and a field which, for him, was scarcely touched. There he could engage in friendly competition with the great Sargent, whose fame was then at its height in England as well as in the United States. He believed also that England possessed, as no other country in Europe, a magnificent tradition of portrait painting handed down in continuous succession of artists, both native and foreign, from the time of Holbein, and carried on by Zucchero, Van Dyck, Lely, Kneller, Angelica Kauffman, the school of Reynolds, Raeburn, Gainsborough and Romney, and by a long line of painters to the present day.

'All this,' he wrote, 'led me to feel that here indeed I could make my life, in this home of the art to which I was devoted, and that I might perhaps aspire to become a link, however humble,in the great chain of foreign artists who had been received and treated by England as her own sons.'

So he and his wife decided to settle in England. Mrs. de Laszlo would be among her own people, and they had the education of their children to think of."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Portrait of a Painter" by Owen Rutter.)