BALDWIN, Mrs Leroy (Ettie Lucille Field)
Description:
Half-length, facing right, wearing a dark hat with feathers, a cream satin-lined fur-edged cloak, and with a choker of several rows of pearls around her neck. Oil on canvas, 30″ x 24″. Signed upper left ‘Muller Ury’.
Provenance:
By descent to Wendy Harris Carhart, 137, East 66th Street, New York, N.Y.10021 (1999). Sold Doyle’s, New York, 17 August 2011, Lot 84 as ‘Portrait of a Lady Wearing a Plumed Hat’ Est: $300-400. Sold for $1500.
Location:
Present whereabouts unknown.
The sitter was the wife of Banker Director of Empire Trust Company Wilbur LeRoy Baldwin (1865-1939), whom she married on October 10, 1890. In 1902 they lived at 8, East 70th Street. They had a daughter called Lucile, who married a George Harris and lived at Tuxedo Park.
Painted in 1902-03. An anonymous cutting, reproducing part of the portrait from a photograph by Davis & Sanford, was pasted in February 1903 in the artist’s second scrapbook.
In New York on Tuesday, May 19, 1931, Muller-Ury recorded in his diary, ‘I went to LeRoy Baldwin to dinner where there were so many people from the Tuxedo – and he was proud of the portrait of his wife and he showed it again.’
According to the sitter’s granddaughter who showed the picture to the editor in 1999, it was originally set in the panelling of a room in her grandparents’ house, hence the small tight format.
