HAVEMEYER, Henry Osborne (1936/7)
Description:
Half length facing right.
Exhibitions:
WILDENSTEIN & CO., INC., 19 East 64th Street, New York, April 20 – May 4, 1937, No. 5.
Bibliography:
The reproduction here is from a cutting from 1937 edition of The Spur magazine where the caption says it says it is a portrait of H. O. Havemeyer.
The sitter was born on April 15, 1876, and was the eldest son of Mr. & Mrs. Theodore A. Havemeyer and nephew of Henry Osborne Havemeyer and his wife Louisine whose collection of Impressionist pictures was donated to the Metropolitan Museum in New York (see: Weitzenhoffer, Frances: The Havemeyers – Impressionism Comes to America, New York 1986). His son was also called Henry Osborne Havemeyer, and should not be confused with either the present sitter or his great-uncle whom Muller-Ury never painted. He died in February 1965.
Muller-Ury was his close friend and spent many weekends at his farm at Mahwah, New Jersey, called Mountainside Farm. He also had a house at Newport, on Harrison Avenue, called Lawnfield. Henry Osborne Havemeyer Sr. owned eleven of Muller-Ury’s portraits of his family, four still lives, and a picture of his wife’s French bulldog, until his death in February 1965 when they were dispersed. Some, including a Madonna and Child which Muller-Ury painted for the Private Chapel at Mahwah, may have been destroyed when the farm suffered arson in the late 1960s. His four children were Carlotta, Henry Osborne Jr., Florence Hildegard and Frederick Charles. Muller-Ury never painted his wife Charlotte Whiting whom he married on July 11, 1900, possibly because there was already two portraits of her by J. Willet in the family (Newport Preservation Society, Rhode Island, and with her grandson) but possibly because Muller-Ury found her difficult.
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The reproduction in the Spur may be of H. O. Havemeyer, but the identification is not necessarily correct. However, the artist stated in his diary for November 7, 1936 that he was working on a portrait of him.
