Oil on canvas, half-length, semi-profile portrait of Arthur Symons.

£2,800 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A fine portrait with an interesting backstory. Mathilde, herself from an aristocratic family, was the wife of Count Victor de la Tour, of the ancient Kingdom of Sardinia (which was governed from Turin and consisted of much of Piedmont and Savoy). Her moment of greatness came with his appointment as the first ambassador of the new united Italian kingdom to Japan, and during her stay in Japan in the early years of the Meiji restoration she was the first Western woman to travel in Japan: her journals and correspondences were recently published in a massive edition. She appears to have become estranged from de la Tour, not least because of her friendship with Arthur de Gobineau, the French diplomat, racist philosopher and novelist, who died in 1882 (de la Tour died in 1893). She and Symons met in Rome in 1896, and remained friends for the rest of her life. She was charming, musical and artistic (painting as “Paul Mahaut”), and painted this portrait of Symons at her family’s rather wonderful Chateau de Chaméane in the Auvergne during his visit in the early autumn of 1898. Symons described the visit to Yeats “I have been here for a month, and I have never had a more agreeable holiday. This 14th century chateau is a continual delight for me, the Countess is the best of companions. I have done, for me, a vast quantity of work”. In the following year he described the picture itself, to his wife Rhoda: “Her portrait of me is by no means commonplace: it flatters me, but it is a real ‘po

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