PFIZER, Lulu Augusta (Later Mrs Spencer Hollond)

The sitter (born July 19, 1882) was the daughter of Mr. Charles Pfizer Jr. (1860-1929) and Nana Davis (died 1953).  She came from Brooklyn, though her immediate family lived in Manhattan and at ‘Pickfair’, Bernardsville, New Jersey.  She married Mr. Spencer Edmund Hollond (1874-1950; educated at Harrow School where he was a friend of Winston Churchill, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, was a career soldier from 1895, ADC to the Duke of Connaught, 1901-1904, and became a Major General in the First World War, awards CB, CMG, DSO) at St. George’s Hanover Square in London on 5th October 1905, and lived at Wonham, Bampton, Devon, England.  They had one son, Charles Arthur Spencer Hollond (1906-1929).  Her obituary appeared in Town & Country in 1911.

Spencer Hollond remarried on 16 September 1920, Esther Eliza Sanderson, daughter of Llewellyn Traherne Bassett Sanderson and Lady Rachel Mary Scott. They had one child, Robert Gustof Percy Hollond, in 1921, who was married in 1948 to Mary Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax and they had four children. In 1972 Mary Hollond married Baron Robert Rothschild.

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The picture was described in the New York Times, December 2, 1901 as ‘…a slender lady in the character of an Ophelia among flowers, but not moved by any passion.’ The Brooklyn Daily Eagle of June 29, 1902 said, ‘The illustration here reproduced will, it should seem, attract decided attention, both because its subject is a girl of a well-known Brooklyn family and because of the quaintness and old time character of its figure. It is from a photograph of a recent portrait of Miss Lula Pfizer, painted by Mueller-Ury, and owes its charm in no small degree to its classical conception and treatment. From its handling it might be a portrait of this Brooklyn girl’s grandmother.’ An article on the artist in Vogue, February 26, 1903, described the portrait more critically: ‘In his portrait of Miss Lulu Phizer (sic) Mr Ury had a subject, with which he is especially in sympathy. The graceful, slender girl is of the poetic type he loves best to paint. The picture, as a whole, is soft in effect – the softness which in some of Mr Ury’s portraits approaches indecision. The blues and greens of the background are repeated in the folds of the scarf and again more delicately in the cold shadow tints of the white gown.’

A portrait of a Miss Pfizer was exhibited by the artist at a studio tea on April 7, 1902 according to the New York Journal, April 8, 1902, which is probably this Miss Pfizer.