Portrait of King Ferdinand I of Romania

Philip de Laszlo was the society portraitist of his age, the man who painted Europe's kings, queens and aristocrats between the wars. This portrait of Ferdinand I of Romania is an unusual commission, because by 1936 the king had been dead for nine years. De Laszlo had to build the likeness from photographs and memory rather than from sittings, one of a set of Romanian royal portraits he made that year, the canvas inscribed simply FERDINANDUS I REX ROMANIAE. It came near the end of his own road too. De Laszlo died in London late in 1937, so this stately, backward-looking image of a dead monarch is among the last works of a painter who had spent his life in front of the living great.