Christine Baroness Fries-Tersch 1929
Three-quarter portrait en face in standing posture, arms crossed in front of her chest, right hand holding left upper arm, gaze turned to her left, not looking at the viewer. Strongly stylized landscape background. The sitter wears a short hairstyle with perms, a beige low-cut silk dress with bronze-colored silk top, on the right hand a gold bracelet, on the ring finger a wedding ring.
JQAW# P_1929_060
Oil on canvas 122 x 83 cm
Signature: John Quincy Ɑdams 1929
Private collection Austria.
Christine "Christl" Baroness Fries-Tersch, née Ebert, remarried Windischgrätz (21.10.1905 Vienna to 24.10.1987 Vienna).
Married in 1st marriage (17.6.1927) to Baron Theodor August von Fries-Tersch (1896-1963), legally separated 28.7.1931, canonically divorced 25.5.1936. 2nd marriage (13.8.1936) to Ludwig Aladár (Prince of) Windischgrätz (12.4.1908 Sárospatak, HU to 3.5.1990 Siggen, D); from this marriage two sons.
One of the last glamorous ladies portraits by Adams before he moved to the USA. Exhibited at the Künstlerhaus for the first time in 1929 as portrait of Baroness Fries (EL 81 1929/1930 #2575). This was also the last Künstlerhaus exhibition Adams participated. The warm browns and golds of the colors and the distant posture and averted gaze of the sitter give the portrait a special charm. Shortly before her death, Christine Fürstin Windischgrätz gave a television interview on the occasion of the opening of the 1986 Adams exhibition at the Akademie Schillerplatz (see also a photo of the 80-year-old in front of her portrait in 1986). In the interview, she explains her distant attitude was triggered by the, in her view, all too overt "flirting" of Adams during the portrait session. In any case, the result was one of the most charismatic and unconventional portraits of Adams, which also captures well the zeitgeist of the "roaring 1920s". Accordingly, the picture was also published several times in the press (including in the Wiener Salonblatt 27.4.1930, p.4).
Cross-references
Exhibited
1929 Künstlerhaus Vienna (EL 81 1929/1930 #2575)
1986 Academy Schillerplatz Vienna, Vienna Society in Portrait, Catalog No. 62.
Literature
Schaffer/Eisenburger 1986, exhibition catalog #62 (w.color ill.)
APH, catalog raisonné JQA 1995, p.221, cat.#188, fig.#127.
Provenance
Sitter.
Her family descendants, Private collection Austria.