Philip de Laszlo: Life and Art

Philip de Laszlo (1869-1937) was the pre-eminent portrait artist working in Britain between 1907 and 1937. He painted nearly 3,000 portraits, including those of numerous kings and queens, four American presidents and countless members of the European nobility. There has been no biography of him since 1939, and this new account of both his life and his work draws on previously untapped material from the family archive of over 15,000 documents, to which the author has had unrivalled access. It establishes the intrinsic importance of his art and re-positions him in his rightful place alongside his great contemporaries John Singer Sargent, Sir John Lavery and Giovanni Boldini. De Laszlo was born Laub Fulop Elek into a humble family in Budapest, but after 1912, when he was ennobled by the Emperor Franz Joseph, he became known as Philip de Laszlo. From an early age he was driven by an unshakable vocation to succeed as an artist. He studied in his home city, Munich and Paris, soon turning to portraiture as his vocation, and in 1894 received his first important commission from the royal family of Bulgaria, followed in 1899 by the Emperor Franz Joseph and, in 1900, Pope Leo XIII, a portrait that won him international fame. In 1907 he and his family settled in England, where he consolidated his reputation. By the time of his death in 1937 he held numerous honours bestowed upon him by royal and presidential sitters throughout the western world. He became a British citizen in 1914, and, despite being interned for over a year during the First World War, his reputation held firm, and in 1930 he was elected to succeed Sickert as President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, confirming his place at the head of his profession. Contemporary appreciation of his extraordinary achievement was encapsulated by his patron, Lord Selborne: 'Has any one painter ever before painted so many interesting and historical personages?'