Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy

Princess Elisabeth Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy (born April 15, 1863; died August 28, 1923, New York City) was a Hungarian-born portrait painter working in Germany and the United States.

Princess Lwoff-Parlaghy, the signature of the artist, dated 1914.

Leben

Elisabeth von Parlaghy was educated in Budapest and by Franz Quaglio and Wilhelm Dürr in Munich, where she adopted the style of Franz von Lenbach. A portrait of her mother brought her her first public notice in Berlin in 1890. In 1891, a public controversy followed the exhibition of her portrait of Moltke; the German Emperor William II offered her protection. Her exhibition of portraits in the Salon de Paris from 1892 to 1894 brought her further public notice.

In 1896 she first visited New York City. Returning to Europe in 1899, she married the Russian Prince Lwoff at Prague; they were later divorced, though she cconinued to style herself the "Princess Lwoff-Parlaghy". She again visited New York in 1899, when her portrait of Admiral George Dewey became the basis of further American success. Returning to Europe in 1900, she lived in Berlin and Nice, France before her permanent return to New York City in 1908.

Manhattan

In Manhattan she lived stylishly in a fourteen-room suite on the third floor of the new Plaza Hotel, which included a private chapel; her retinue there included a personal surgeon and a chamberlain, as well as a pet lion named "Goldfleck". She became known as a 5th Avenue portraitist, partly as a result of a well-publicized visit she paid to her cousin Abbott Lawrence Lowell, then President of Harvard, in 1911, during which she travelled by private railway car and insisted on dining off her own solid-gold dinnerware. After Goldfleck's death in 1912, the Princess summered in the Catskills.

In 1913 she celebrated her fiftieth birthday with a exhibition of a series of her German portraits in the Plaza. In 1916 she moved to Park Avenue, commencing her residence with a presentation of a portrait of John Burroughs; that same year she presented her so-called "blue portrait" of the inventor Nikola Tesla in her studio at 109 East 39th Street. She celebrated her sixtieth birthday in 1923 with an exhibition of what she called her Manhattan Hall of Fame in the Carlton on Madison Avenue. This included a portrait of the Brooklyn merchant Ludwig Nissen (1855-1924), which was later transferred to his Ludwig-Nissen Foundation, Husum, Germany.

Princess Lwoff-Parlaghy died in 1923; the poet Edwin Markham gave her funeral oration. She is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Work

Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy: Louis Eduard Jüncke (1838 - 1900), donator of the former Louis Jüncke Foundation, Baden-Baden, before 1900

There are about 120 known portraits of prominent Americans and Europeans by Princess Lwoff-Parlaghy, dating from 1884 to 1923.

Portrait Reference List

(Most of these portraits were part of the "Manhattan Hall of Fame":)

• August Belmont, Jr.
• John Burroughs, portrait now at Vassar College
• Andrew Carnegie
• Joseph Hodges Choate
• William Conant Church
• Chauncey M. Depew
• George Dewey
• Thomas Alva Edison
• Daniel Chester French
• Myron T. Herrick
• Friedrich Hirth
• Seth Low
• Edwin Markham
• Hudson Maxim
• Alton B. Parker
• Henry Phipps
• Horace Porter
• Daniel E. Sickles
• Charles Dwight Sigsbee
• Nikola Tesla
• Benjamin Tracy
• James Grant Wilson

Literature

• Cornelius Steckner: Die New Yorker Malerfürstin Vilma Princess Lwoff-Parlaghy, in: Bilder aus der Neuen und der Alten Welt, 1993, 34 - 41; 152 - 156.