STOTESBURY, Eva Roberts Cromwell

This reproduction of a portrait of Mrs. Edward T. Stotesbury is from the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, December 21, 1914. No artist’s name is given. But could it be by Muller-Ury?

Eva’s husband Edward T. Stotesbury was the Philadelphia investment banker who worked with J. Pierpont Morgan whose 1913 funeral in New York Muller-Ury attended.

Certainly, the Philadelphia Inquirer on Friday November 12, 1915 reports that society portrait artist A. Muller-Ury was a guest of Mrs Stotesbury at the NY Horse show the previous day. If he painted Eva in autumn 1914 in Philadelphia, and it could be his stylistically, though difficult from a newspaper image to be sure, that might be the reason the picture is not known, for portraits that Muller-Ury made out of New York rarely got photographed for him. There is also scant information from 1914 onwards in his papers….though there is an anonymous cutting stuck in his scrapbook in early 1915 that says he attended the opera as a guest of the Stotesburys…and of course the artist was a close friend of Duveen who was a supplier of fine art and antiques to the Stotesburys.

It seems best to catalogue this here until evidence either way is forthcoming.

The editor is grateful to Ed Bor of the Facebook group ‘Fans of Whitemarsh Hall’, for drawing this picture to his attention.