Mrs. Hart or Portrait of painter Letitia Hart seated on a rock (1911)

Signed and dated on the base: “Paul Troubetzkoy 1911”

Foundry stamp: “C. Valsuani Cire Perdue”

Unique Specimen

Provenance: Monza, Private collection

Exhibitions: Chicago, Art Institute, 1912, no. 25; Rome, Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Secessione, 1913, no. 71.

Notes: Inside the sculpture, cartouche of the 1913 Roman Secession and cartouche with the name of the depicted “Signora Hart” (Mrs. Hart).

Described by George Bernard Shaw as “the most astonishing sculptor of modern times”[1], Paul Troubetzkoy, has been the great interpreter of modern life, translated into a dynamic, vibrant sculpture, so sharp as to capture even the slightest changes of a society in an extensive evolution between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Famous for his virtuosic and intimate portraits of the aristocratic and bourgeois elites of the cosmopolitan universe in which he works, the sculptor quickly alternated from commemorative monuments to animalier sculpture, from small-scale female subjects to the portraits some of the greatest figures of world history, from Lev Tolstoy to Alexander II of Russia, as well as Franklin Delano Roosvelt.

Born in the small town of Intra on Lake Maggiore in Italy – 1866, Troubetzkoy possesses an international lineage: his father is a Russian aristocrat and diplomat, while his mother is an American opera singer. The cultural climate in which he grows up is very fertile: his parents, collectors and patrons, welcome artists and writers, in particular Daniele Ranzoni, who goes through one of the most thriving periods of his Scapigliato painting era at their villa and gives drawing lessons to the young Troubetzkoy brothers. After moving to Milan in 1884, the young artist expands his circle of acquaintances, from Giovanni Segantini to Rembrandt Bugatti. Although his beginnings at the Brera Academy are linked to animalier sculptures, which he will be passionate about throughout his life, the artist’s fame which soon spreads from Milan to Paris, from Chicago to New York and to St. Petersburg, is closely connected to the concept of the portrait as a narration of a status symbol, as an affirmation of a continually growing society: in America, at the height of the so-called Gilded Age, large entrepreneurs begin to collect works by illustrious European artists and at the same time, Belle Époque Europe glitters with elegant balls and major artistic exhibitions. Troubetzkoy, enveloped in his charm as an independent and fashionable artist, wins the confidence of bankers, industrialists, and rising bourgeoise, as a “sharp student of human physiognomy […], aiming not only to portray with rare effectiveness the expressive mobility of the face, but also to provide as much as possible, the optical illusion of movement”[2]. These words used by Vittorio Pica with “Emporium” in 1900 inaugurate the new century with suggestive images of a sculptor capable of impressing his artistic figures with a “strange thrill of life”. In the same year, when Count Robert de Montesquiou – whose portrait he will later paint – visits the Universal Exhibition in Paris, despite being convinced that contemporary sculpture fails to grasp the transient nature of modern life, will then praise Troubetzkoy’s works for their “singular yet natural manners, which also refined real expressions”[3]. At the dawn on the new century, the sculptor’s success spreads from Paris and reaches the heights of the world’s largest exhibitions. Following the great success of Joaquín Sorolla’s 1909 exhibition at the Hispanic Society in New York, Troubetzkoy writes to the painter and requests to be introduced to Archer Milton Huntington, the famous scholar, philanthropist and patron, founder of the Society. A significant boost for the sculptor, who consequently exhibits at the Hispanic Society between February and March 1911.

This American exhibition is followed by many others, all with the same explosive success with critics and audiences as well, including the solo exhibition of eighty-seven works at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1912. It is precisely at this exhibition that the portrait Mrs. Hart, dated 1911, appears for the first time and is later displayed again at the solo exhibition at the Roman Secession in 1913. A description of the sculpture “depicting said lady, sitting on a rock by the water” appears in the 1914 Bollettino della Proprietà Intellettuale (Intellectual Property Bulletin). A modern lady, a quick and elegant view of a woman sitting in a spontaneous pose, with her arms gathered in her lap, her face barely sketched. All wrapped in a skilful modelling, with the irregular and wavy bronze which rigorously keeps the gesture of the stick on the clay invariably imprinted on it, with rougher or smoother protrusions to welcome the light. As in other seated figures, including Baronessa Robert de Rothschild (Baroness Robert de Rothschild) from the same year, the sculptor does not favour a single point of view, preferring multiple ones which accentuate the jagged appearance of shore’s rock and the fusion between the subject and the setting. The reflection of a thought flashes on the woman’s captivated face, in the perfect “undefinable union of truth and idealization”[4] mentioned by Diego Angeli in his review of Troubetzkoy’s solo exhibition at the Secession. The identity of this slender and elegant female figure, Signora Hart (Mrs. Hart) – name indicated in the cartouche inside the work – seems to correspond to that of the American painter and illustrator Letitia Hart, daughter of the painter who was a member of the Hudson River School art movement, James McDougal Hart, famous for his vivid lake landscapes and his so-called cattle paintings. A student of her father at the Brooklyn Academy of Design, she shares her New York studio with her sister Mary Theresa, a painter and illustrator like Letitia, at 11 East 14th Street until 1914: “I consider myself a pioneer in the work […] I remember when I was the only woman in this building. Now there are a dozen or more, not to speak of the thousands that are scattered in various parts of the city who are studying at numerous art schools”[5]. His genre paintings set in pleasant aristocratic interiors, populated by women engaged in the most disparate activities, such as conversations along with reading and painting, toured the most important exhibitions in the United States between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.  It is likely that Troubetzkoy, during his first stay in New York in 1911 – a “frenetic succession of exhibitions and portraits, travels, and meetings”[6] – met the painter Hart and honoured her with a portrait of the artist sitting on a rock by the water, a plausible reference to her strong connection with the family’s country home in Lakeville Connecticut, on the shores of Lake Wononscopomuc, often featured in her father’s works. A delicate artist’s portrait, therefore, modelled in America in 1911 and cast in lost wax at the renowned Parisian foundry Valsuani, is testimony to Troubetzkoy’s ties, not only with the world of the American entrepreneurial upper class, but also with the female and male artistic milieu of an ever-growing New York, a city that would soon welcome him at the outbreak of the First World War.

Elena Lago

[1] G. B. Shaw, Sculpture by prince Paul Troubetzkoy, Exhibition Catalogue (London, Colnaghi Gallery, December 1931), London, P. & D. Colnaghi & Co, 1931, p. 5.

[2] V. Pica, Paolo Troubetzkoy, in “Emporium”, XII, 67, 1900, p. 10.

[3] R. de Montesquiou, Au prince Troubetzkoy, “Les Mondes”, Paris, June 1902.

[4] D. Angeli, La mostra di Paolo Troubetzkoy all’Esposizione di Roma, in «L’Illustrazione italiana», XL, 15, 1913, p. 356.

[5] Interview with Letitia Hart for the article A Woman who paints Women, “Metropolitan Magazine”, IX, 1, 1899, p. 162.

[6] J. S. Grioni, Un ritrattista cosmopolita. Precisazioni critiche e biografiche, in Paolo Troubetzkoy 1866-1938, Exhibition Catalogue edited by G. Piantoni, P. Venturoli (Verbania Pallanza, Museo del Paesaggio April 29 – July 20, 1990), Turin, Il Quadrante Edizioni, 1990, p. 228.