Description
Signed and dated 1932, oil on paper
Dimensions
81cm x 66cm (32in x 26in)
Footnote
Born in Budapest in 1869, Philip de László was a tailor's son who would become one of Europe's most successful and respected portrait painters, capturing on canvas the likeness of heads of state (including four American presidents), members of European royal families from our own Queen Elizabeth II to Kaiser Wilhelm II, and a plethora of artists, writers, and elegant society ladies. His oeuvre is now rightly recognised as 'a mirror to the Indian summer of the aristocrats of Europe in the Edwardian era, through the storms that swept so many away and through to the 1930's, with not a quiver of uncertainty as to their future.'1
William Aiken was deeply involved with the city of Dundee, and a keen patron of the arts. Born in 1880, he became City Chamberlain, and served during World War Two as Divisional Food Officer. He was appointed Justice of the Peace, and in 1949 received the Order of the British Empire.
His portrait is recorded in the artist's archive, where we learn that de László completed it in a single morning on the 26th July 1932. Discussing the artist's fame in his lifetime for capturing a likeness in under two hours, the National Portrait Gallery's Paul Moorhouse declares that his 'brilliance can now be seen for what it is. He was an excellent colourist, a wonderful craftsman and hugely accomplished.'2 The swift, expressive brushwork of this portrait concisely captures the personality of its subject, with whom the artist had developed a friendship after first meeting him in 1929. It is typical, too, of the artist's portraits of male sitters (such as that of Sir Luke Fildes, held in the National Portrait Gallery, London), in its warm brown and black background, enlivened by the vivid midnight blue of his suit and tie. Artist and sitter exchanged a number of warm, handwritten letters, while Lucy de László wrote from the French Riviera and Eastbourne thanking William Aiken for the boxes of shortbread he sent from Scotland! Their friendship endured, and in 1933 he was invited to the wedding of de László's son. Philip de László died in 1937, some years before his friend William Aiken, who passed away in 1950.