Portrait of Queen Marie of Romania, née Princess Marie of Edinburgh

Philip de Laszlo painted this portrait in February 1936, and by then Queen Marie of Romania was near the end of a very public life. A granddaughter of both Queen Victoria and Tsar Alexander II, she had married into the Romanian royal house and become the country's most famous figure during the First World War, nursing wounded soldiers and lobbying hard for Romania at the Paris peace talks afterward. By 1936 her husband King Ferdinand was long dead and her son Carol II had pushed her to the sidelines of court life. De Laszlo was the most sought-after society portraitist of his day, a Hungarian who had painted much of European royalty. Both of them were close to the end: he died in 1937, and the queen followed in 1938.