The Catalogue Raisonné Team
London office
-
Sandra de Laszlo
Founder
Married to Damon de Laszlo, one of the artist’s 7 grandsons. Trained at the Victoria and Albert Museum, achieving a Diploma (with Credit) at the Study Centre for the History of the Fine & Decorative Arts 1972-3. For eleven years she worked part time in the Picture Department at Spink and Son, then as a guide at the Tate Gallery and at the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital for their Healing Arts Programme. She has been working on the De László Catalogue Raisonné since she dared to write her first letter to an owner in New York in 1989. She was co-curator with Christopher Wood and Richard Ormond of the de László exhibition A Brush with Grandeur at Christie’s London in January 2004, and its accompanying catalogue. She was co-curator for the exhibition De László in Holland at the Museum van Loon, Amsterdam, March – June 2006, and British Editor of the book De László in Holland. In 2010 the National Portrait Gallery in London mounted a Special Display: Philip de László, Portraits, to celebrate the completion of the indexing of the artist’s papers by Sandra’s team – a 5 year endurance test of transcribing & translating some 15,000 letters and documents. The Catalogue Raisonné is still very much in progress and the illustrated picture descriptions are published online. In 2016 Sandra and her editors attained the 1,000 mark (the equivalent of some several printed volumes) – which may be less than one quarter of the final count of portraits painted by de László.
-
Katherine Field
Senior Editor
Katherine is a native of Canada and arrived in England to complete a Masters in Fine and Decorative Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Since then she has worked at Tate Britain, the Foundling Museum, The British Art Journal, and the V&A Museum of Childhood and has been involved in the commercial art world assisting two well-respected London dealers in Old Master and British Pictures. She joined the Catalogue Raisonné team in 2011.
-
Emilia Holt
Photographic Editor
Emilia is an artist currently practising in London, having completed her MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. She works part-time and commissions photography of de László's paintings, liasing with private owners, institutions, and fine art photographers worldwide. She is compiling de László's photographic archive, scanning, editing, conserving and indexing transparencies and digital files.
-
Susan de Laszlo
Spanish and South American Editor
Married for many years to Christopher de Laszlo, one of the artist’s grandsons. After gaining a BA Hons degree in Spanish and French at Trinity College, Dublin in 1969, she qualified as a modern languages teacher at Exeter University in 1971. She has spent most of her career teaching Spanish in the south of England and organizing cultural visits to Spain. She has attained the professional Diploma in Public Service Interpreting (Spanish/English) and is a member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists. She joined the Catalogue Raisonné team in August 2008 and enjoyed helping Sandra trace and research de László portraits in Spain and South America. From 2012 she has been transcribing Lucy de László's diaries in preparation for private publication.
-
Tim Gates
Technical Editor
BSc. (Hons.) in Applied Physics. Tim's career has involved particle physics research, development engineer, production of training books/videos, management development and resource management at BBC, setting up and running the technical, operational and IT departments of tv channels; associate producer of documentary and current affairs tv programmes. Project managing the development and build of music, media, film and citytv websites and devising video content formats. He assists the Catalogue Raisonnée team with his computer skills and has done the larger part of editing and 'metadata-ing' the de László Film Archive.
Abroad
-
Alexandra Titze-Grabec
European Editor
MA Hons. in Translation German-English-Italian, MA Hons. Art History at the Universityof Vienna. Alexandra joined the team after working for several years as an administrator at Christie’s Vienna and for the Federal Office for the Protection of Monuments in Vienna. She has won two scholarships, one to study in Lausanne and the second to research Islamic elements in commercial architecture in Venice. She is a freelance art-historian and translator specialised in Art History and Architecture. Together with Christopher Wentworth-Stanley she is researching and writing catalogue entries for the German and Austrian sitters.
-
Beata Somfalvi
Hungarian Editor
MA Hons. Art History Loránd Eötvös University, Budapest. As Exhibitions’ Curator at the Hungarian Cultural Centre in London, she helped to realise the A Brush with Grandeur exhibition. Now living in Zagreb, Croatia she is working closely with the museums and galleries in Hungary, especially in her hometown, Budapest. She is researching the Hungarian pictures and their provenance, writing catalogue entries for the early portraits and genre pictures.
-
Paul d’Orbán
Contributing Editor, Hungarian paintings
Until his death in May 2020, Paul was a much valued member of our team. A great-nephew of the artist's wife Lucy de László through her sister Ethel, he was half Hungarian through his father. He was educated at the English College, Sárospatak, Hungary, and at the University of Aberdeen, where he read Medicine. He specialised in Psychiatry and was consultant psychiatrist at the Royal Free Hospital, London, before retiring to Victoria, B.C., Canada. His enormous and valuable contribution to the catalogue included the translation of Hungarian and German documents in the de László Archive and writing entries for historically important early Hungarian portraits.
-
Matt Davies
American Editor
A native of St. Louis, Missouri, now residing in Dallas, Texas, Matt graduated from William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, with a BA in Political Science and History in 1998. He has been employed in banking since then, but in his spare time enjoys reading history, art, and architecture. He has indexed and transcribed a number of documents in the de László archive and continues to research and write catalogue entries for de László's American sitters.
-
Christopher Wentworth-Stanley
European Consultant
He is an historian and genealogist based in Vienna who worked with Sandra on writing the picture descriptions for the book A Brush with Grandeur, as well as assisting with the editorial work on de László in Holland. He has been studying the life and work of Philip de László for 20 years and more recently has been concentrating on tracking down lost and unrecorded paintings by de László in Austria, Germany and Eastern Europe and writing entries for these works.