Oil on canvas, 90.2 x 59.4
Signed and dated br.: de Laszlo/1934

Provenance: Given in 1949 by the artist’s son John de Laszlo to Professor S. R. K. Glanville of University College, London, for his lifetime and subsequently (1956) to the National Portrait Gallery.

Literature: O. Rutter, Portrait of a Painter: the authorised life of Philip de Laszlo, 1939, p. 373; D. Clifford, The Paintings of P. A. de Laszlo, 1969, p. 124, ill. pl. 44.

By Philip de Laszlo, 1934

When Lawrence decided that he wished to continue excavating in the Middle East after the first Carchemish season, Hogarth arranged for him to spend some weeks gaining experience in Egypt at Kafr Ammar, a dig supervised by the distinguished Egyptologist Flinders Petrie (1853-1942).

Lawrence joined this excavation in January 1912. He was impressed by Petrie, but disliked digging up Egyptian graveyards: 'It is a strange sight to see the men forcing open a square coffin, and taking out the painted anthropoid envelope within, and splitting this up also to drag out a mummy, not glorious in bright wrappings, but dark brown, fibrous, visibly rotting – and then the thing begins to come to pieces, and the men tear off its head, and bare the skull, and the vertebrae drop out, and the ribs, and legs and perhaps only one poor amulet is the result: the smell and sights are horrible . . . Mr. Hogarth was quite right in arranging for no longer: I’m no body snatcher, and we have a pile of skulls that would do credit to a follower of Jenghis Khan.'¹

Petrie was evidently impressed by Lawrence, because he offered him £700 to run an excavation of his own in Bahrein if there were no further seasons at Carchemish in 1913.

The Badarian vase c.5000 BC, shown in the portrait, is one of a series found by Petrie at Naqada in 1895.

1. T. E. Lawrence to his family, 11.1.1912, HL p. 185.