Frank Billings Kellogg
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1925
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Art Appreciation
Frank Billings Kellogg is an oil-on-canvas portrait by Philip de László, painted in London in 1925 and now in the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (NPG.2006.113). The canvas measures 95.3 by 74.9 cm and is inscribed de László / 1925. II., dating it to February of that year.
Kellogg (1856–1937) was a Minnesota lawyer who made his name in federal antitrust prosecutions, above all the Standard Oil case of 1911, and served as a Republican senator from 1917 to 1923. President Calvin Coolidge sent him to London as ambassador, a post he held from 14 January 1924 to 10 February 1925, before recalling him to become Secretary of State. In that office he co-authored the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, which renounced war as an instrument of national policy, and he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929.
The sittings took place as Kellogg was leaving Britain. Press cuttings kept in the de László archive record that he commissioned the portrait for the American Chancellery; The Sketch reported that it would hang at the embassy beside de László's portraits of two earlier ambassadors, Walter Hines Page and John W. Davis. The Daily Mail and Daily Graphic printed photographs of the retiring ambassador sitting to the painter, the New York Herald noted that Mrs Kellogg had no time to sit for her own portrait, and The Times illustrated the finished picture in its report of a farewell dinner given by Viscount and Viscountess Astor. Kellogg is shown seated, in scarlet and white academic robes over a dark suit, against a dark ground with a red curtain.
De László, born in Budapest in 1869, had been based in London since 1907 and was much in demand for portraits of royalty, aristocrats and public figures. According to the National Portrait Gallery, this portrait remained with the sitter until his death in 1937; his family gave it to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1944. It was sold at auction in New York in 1979, appeared at Christie's East in 1990 and was given to the Smithsonian in 2006 by Edward T. Wilson.