Philip Alexius de László (1869-1937)

Lady Orr-Lewis signed the artist’s sitters’ book on 5th March 1917, an extremely busy time for the artist as he was painting portraits of officers about to depart for the front or briefly home on leave. A few short months later he would find himself imprisoned as an enemy foreign national, owing to his Hungarian birth.

Maude Helen Mary Booth was born in Montreal, the only daughter of William Booth of London, Ontario. On 18th June 1896 she married businessman Sir Frederick Orr-Lewis, 1st Bt (1860-1921) who was President of the Canadian holdings of Vickers Ltd. and survived the sinking of RMS Lusitania in 1915. She married secondly, in 1929, James Sinclair Grant-Milne who was later executed as a member of the French Resistance during the Second World War.