Philip De Laszlo

Philip de Laszlo (1869-1937) was the pre-eminent portrait artist working in Britain between the years 1907 and 1937. He painted more than 3,000 portraits, including 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 much new material from the family archive consisting of over 15,000 documents. It establishes the intrinsic importance of his art and re-positions him alongside his great contemporaries John Singer Sargent, Sir John Lavery and Giovanni Boldini. Born into a humble family in Budapest in 1869 he was ennobled by the Emperor Franz Joseph and from 1912 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 Budapest, Munich and Paris, soon turning to portraiture, 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 settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1914. 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 British Artists, confirming his place at the head of his profession.