Lady Orr-Lewis, née Maude Helen Mary Booth 1917

This is a portrait of Lady Orr-Lewis, painted by Philip Alexius de László, though we don't know exactly when. Look at how the browns and blacks of the background almost swallow her whole. It must have taken so much effort to achieve this kind of tonal variation. I can imagine de László, squinting, layering, and relayering those dark hues. Did she sit patiently, as the paint slowly conjured her likeness? I feel the weight of his technical education, all that training, trying to balance the need for the painting to be a likeness and the ambition to make it sing as paint. That gold shawl is beautifully painted; you can almost feel the slippery quality of the fabric. When I look at this portrait, I see echoes of Sargent, Whistler, all those painters wrestling with light and surface, each one hoping to capture a bit of life on canvas.