Elisabeth Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy

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Self-portrait by Elisabeth Vilma Parlaghy, 1880s

Elisabeth Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy (born April 15, 1863 in Hajdúdorog in Hajdú County , Austrian Empire ; died August 28, 1923 in New York City ) was a Hungarian-American portrait painter. Around 1900 she was known as the "painter princess".

Life

Portrait of Wilhelmine Parlaghy-Brachfeld (1890)
Portrait of Helmut von Moltke (1891)
Elisabeth Vilma Parlaghy in the Baden Salon 1895 (in the middle)

Elizabeth Vilma was the daughter of the Hungarian civil servant Parlaghy-Brachfeld and his wife Wilhelmine (nee Edlen von Zollerndorf). She received her painting training in Budapest and then in Munich by Franz Quaglio and Wilhelm Dürr the Younger , who trained her in the style of Franz von Lenbach . Eventually she became a member of Lenbach's studio, where she not only studied his painting technique, but also got to know his business model as a portraitist. In 1883 she received her first gold medal at the International Art Exhibition in Munich. A trip to Italy in 1885 rounded off her artistic training.

In 1887/88 she moved to Berlin. In 1890 she married the lawyer Karl Krüger, from whom she divorced five years later. She first caused a stir in 1890 when a portrait of her mother was shown at an exhibition in Berlin . Her Moltke portrait was controversial there in 1891, but by then she was already in the favor of the German Emperor Wilhelm II , who purchased the picture and ordered it to be shown in the exhibition. In 1892 she received several commissions for portraits of the emperor. In 1894 she received a large gold medal at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition . She was also recognized in the Paris Salon and awarded between 1892 and 1894. In 1895 she held an exhibition with over a hundred of her own works in her Berlin salon.

From 1896 to 1899 she stayed in New York City for the first time . Back in Europe, she married the Russian prince Lwoff in Prague from the Russian Rurikid dynasty of the Lwow and lived with him on his property on the Tegernsee , but was divorced after a short time. From now on she called herself "Princess Lwoff-Parlaghy". Back in the USA, she painted Admiral George Dewey and thus found access to wealthy US clients.

In 1902 she became the first woman to be a member of the jury for the Great Berlin Art Exhibition. She married Peter Nors and had their daughter Vilma Nors in 1905. While the mother was in Berlin and Nice, the daughter grew up in London. In 1908 Lwoff-Parlaghy went to the USA for good. In New York, she lived appropriately with a lot of staff in various luxury hotels such as the Plaza Hotel . She created numerous portraits of the American upper class. Their success decreased drastically with the First World War. After her death, she was forgotten.

Tesla's blue portrait 1913

Blue portrait of Nikola Tesla (1913)

In 1913 Nikola Tesla had Lwoff-Parlaghy portray himself in oil paint, for which he installed extra light bulbs with blue light filters in the studio . The picture became known as the Blue Portrait and was presented at exhibitions in New York in 1913 and 1916. However, no buyers were found and the painting remained the property of the artist. After the painter's estate was auctioned off, it was considered lost until it was rediscovered in the Husum North Sea Museum-Nissenhaus in the early 2000s . A donation from the estate of Ludwig Nissen , who died as a diamond dealer in Brooklyn in 1924 , brought some of Lwoff-Parlaghy's paintings to Husum , including a self-portrait and a portrait of Nissen and the blue portrait of Nikola Tesla.

Portraits of famous people

literature

Web links

Commons : Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Yvette Deseyve, Ralph Gleis: Struggle for visibility. Artists of the Nationalgalerie before 1919 . National Gallery. National Museums in Berlin, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-496-01634-2 , pp. 152-153 .
  2. ^ Vilma Elisabeth Lwoff-Parlaghy: Count Helmut Moltke, 1800-1891. museen-nord.de, accessed on January 10, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Exhibitions, collections, etc. In: Art for everyone: painting, sculpture, graphics, architecture . 6th year, issue 22, August 15, 1891, p. 351 ( digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de ).
  4. ↑ Tesla in the public eye . In: Husumer Nachrichten . March 26, 2009 ( shz.de ).
  5. ↑ Nikola Tesla's "Blue Portrait" by Princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy
  6. ↑ Rediscovery of the "blue portrait" after 85 years (PDF; 48 kB)
personal data
SURNAME Lwoff-Parlaghy, Elisabeth Vilma
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Parlaghy, Vilma; Parlaghy, Elisabeth Vilma (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian painter
DATE OF BIRTH April 15, 1863
PLACE OF BIRTH Hajdúdorog , Hajdú county
DATE OF DEATH August 28, 1923
Place of death New York City