A Brush With Grandeur: Philip Alexius de Laszlo (1869-1937)

Philip de Laszlo (1869-1937), following a meteoric rise to recognition in his native Hungary, settled in Britain in 1907 and became its leading portrait-painter - taking over from Sargent. He painted not only crowned heads throughout Europe, but elected ones, too, and the rich and influential all over the Western world - he painted the present Queen Elizabeth as a girl, as well as the late Queen Mother and George VI; he painted four American Presidents (Roosevelt, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover); he painted Byngs, Balfours, Schroders, Mellons, Mountbattens, and many, many more. He was renowned for his unbeatable likenesses, his speed and directness, his talent for friendship. Dukes kept his portraits beside their Van Dycks and their Gainsboroughs, and thought he did well in their company. He was known especially as a portraitist of beautiful women (Elinor Glyn wanted him to paint her on a tiger skin), but his male portraits are also powerful and his talent was universal - including landscape, animal subjects and children, and drawings as well as oil paintings.
Partly because ninety per cent of his works remain in private collections, partly owing to modernist politics and prejudice, de Laszlo's paintings are very little known. This book, the first devoted to the artist for more than thirty years, illustrates a rich and representative selection of his work, reproduced in new colour photographs. It charts his career from his first success with genre paintings in his native Hungary to his last commissions at the time of George VI's Coronation, including many of his most famous works.