Adolfo Müller-Ury sitters

Political figures

Emperor William II (1909, at the New Palace, Potsdam) given to Columbia University’s Deutsches Haus by the Neue-Yorker Staats Zeitung who commissioned it, but missing since the 1960s; the bust-length oil sketch is now at the Max-Planck Institute in Berlin.

President William McKinley seated in 1899 (missing), the standing version (1900 re-dated 1901) is now at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington

General Ulysses S Grant (1897) since 1899 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington (a fine head study was in a Private Collection in New York until 1975)

Varina Howell (Mrs Jefferson Davis) in 1895 (Beauvoir, Biloxi, Mississippi) and her daughter Winnie Davis in 1897-8 (Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia, gift of the artist 1918)

Theodore Roosevelt (Collection of Edmund Morris)

Edith Galt (Mrs Woodrow Wilson) (a wedding present from Colonel Edward M House, 1916) now at the White House

Mrs Edward M House

President Wilson delivering his ‘war speech’ before Congress on 3 April 1917 (at the League of Nations in Geneva, the gift of Lord Duveen in 1935), and a smaller version painted at the same time was given by the artist in 1943 to Mrs Cordell Hull for the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace Foundation in Staunton, Virginia

President Benjamin Harrison’s granddaughter Mary Lodge McKee Reisinger

Several Swiss politicians who became Presidents

Louis Ruchonnet (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne)

Bernhard Hammer (missing)

Giuseppe Motta in the late 1930s for the authorities in Bellinzona.

He also painted the first permanent diplomatic representative of Switzerland in the United Kingdom, Dr Charles Daniel Bourcart of Basel (now at the Swiss Embassy in London).

The Roman Catholic Hierarchy

Francesco Satolli (Cardinal Satolli) first Papal Nuncio in the United States (1893) (missing)

Pope Pius X in 1907 (North American College, Rome) which was a commission from Mrs Anne Weightman Walker of Philadelphia, again in 1908 (St Joseph's Seminary, Yonkers) and in 1911 (Catholic University of America, Washington) all three-quarters seated; also a number of smaller head and shoulder portraits painted in these years

Papal Secretary of State Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val in 1907 (Historisches Museum von Uri, Altdorf)

Archbishop Dr Thomas F Kennedy, 1907 (St Charles Borromeo Seminary, Overbrook, PA) and 1911 (North American College, Rome)

Monsignor Gaetano Bisleti (missing)

Cardinal John Murphy Farley (1913) (missing)

Désiré-Joseph Mercier (Cardinal Mercier) during his visit to the United States, often misleadingly stated to be at Catholic University at Washington but actually in Switzerland at the Stiftung Adolfo Müller-Ury in Hospental, Canton Uri

Pope Benedict XV in 1920 (Catholic University of America, Washington) and at the Stiftung Adolfo Müller-Ury in Hospental, Canton Uri

Monsignor Charles O’Hern, 1920 (North American College, Rome)

Pope Pius XI in 1923 for which he was made a Knight of St Gregory the Great (two versions, the bust-length at St Joseph’ Seminary, Yonkers and North American College, Rome; the standing version at the Historisches Museum von Uri, Altdorf [but dated later]), and full-length seated in 1930 for which he was raised to the title of Papal Count—this portrait was painted expressly to hang permanently in the Nuova Pinacoteca but is no longer in the Vatican storerooms

Cardinal Patrick Joseph Hayes (1924, cut down, Cardinal’s Residence, NYC)

in 1930 he also painted his friend Cardinal Bonaventura Cerretti

Famous international opera singers

Emma Calvé (full-length, 1894) (missing)

Pol Plançon (1897), a commission from Emma Marcy Raymond the composer of the operettas Doretta and The Sheik

Marcella Sembrich (1899, twice) (missing)

Lina Cavalieri (1907, Metropolitan Opera House, New York)

Dame Nellie Melba (1908)

Frances Alda (1910) (missing)

Popular actresses

Glacia Calla (missing)

Lillian Russell (1902) (full-length, missing)

Margaret Illington (1906) at the time of her first marriage to the theatre manager Daniel Frohman (missing)

Other sitters include

Benjamin Altman, department store owner and art collector (the portrait of Altman seated in his gallery with a vase on a table beside him was given to the Altman Foundation in 1913 but is now missing—a smaller portrait is in the New York State Museum at Albany)

A F De Bernasconi Corti and his wife (a Swiss millionaire who had made a fortune in Buenos Aires) (missing)

Stephen Birch President of the Kennecott Mining Co (1911) (missing)

Mrs Hobart Chatfield-Taylor, wife of a popular novelist (missing)

James Constable (two versions, three-quarter seated in the American Museum of Natural History, New York; a bust-length in the New York State Museum at Albany)

Margaret French Cresson, the sculptress daughter of Daniel Chester French (1912, formerly at Chesterwood)

Marcus Daly, the copper magnate

Senator Chauncey M Depew many times and both of his wives (Mr Depew was also etched)

A full-length of Dorothy Duveen as a girl in 1914 and another bust-length at the time of her engagement in 1924 (both missing)

Elizabeth Wharton Drexel (Mrs John Vinton Dahlgren) (Georgetown University, Washington DC)

Mrs Louis Ehret and her son (missing)

Mrs Karl Evans (1904, for her paternal grandmother Nancy Ganson—the sitter became famous later as Mabel Dodge Luhan, patron of the avant-garde and correspondent of Gertrude Stein)

Charles Mather Ffoulke, manufacturer and collector of the Barberini tapestries (missing)

Michael Friedsam, department store owner and art collector (missing)

Commodore Elbridge Thomas Gerry (New York Yacht Club)

Mrs James D Goin, daughter of Samuel N Pike, builder of Pike’s Opera House, and sister of artist Alice Pike Barney (missing)

Thomas Watt Gregory, US Attorney General (1917, Department of Justice, Washington)

Marcus Alonzo Hanna (1902/3, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio)

James J Hill many times, the finest portrait of whom he painted in 1902 and was formerly in the collection of the New York Chamber of Commerce and now hangs at the offices of Credit Suisse First Boston in New York

Mr David H Hostetter, heir to Hostetter’s Bitters and successful oilman, and later his wife Miriam

Charles F Hoffman (Union Club, New York)

Emily Key Hoffman, mother of fashion expert Diana Vreeland (missing)

Charles Evans Hughes US Chief Justice (Michigan Historical Museum, Lansing)

George E Ide, banker and President of the Yale Club of New York

Elise Ladew, later Mrs William R Grace, whose brother was gardener Harvey Ladew, friend of King Edward VIII

Mrs Thomas B Lockwood [posthumously 1934] and somewhat earlier her mother Mrs George K Birge (Poetry/Rare Book Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo)

William d’Alton Mann the editor of Town Topics (missing)

William R Merriam of St Paul (Minnesota Historical Society)

J Pierpont Morgan some eight times from 1904 (all missing), and with his granddaughter Mabel Satterlee

Mrs Frederick Neilson, mother of Mrs Reginald Vanderbilt (missing)

Lewis Nixon, naval constructor—also a full-length of his son Stanhope Wood Nixon in Scottish costume

Judge Morgan O’Brien (twice) and his daughter Madeleine O’Brien (later Mrs Stuart D Preston) (both missing)

Lily Oelrichs, later Mrs Peter Martin and Duchess of Mecklenburg (missing)

Oswald Ottendorfer of the Neue-Yorker Staats-Zeitung (twice)

Jesse Maxwell Overton and his wife Sadie Williams Overton of Nashville, TN (1903)

Judge Alton B Parker (two versions)

Madame Felipe Pardo Y Barreda, the wife of the Vice-President of Peru, with her daughter Ana (1917) (missing)

Alice Pfizer, daughter of Charles Pfizer Sr and pharmaceuticals heiress, later Baroness Bachofen-Echt (Private Collection, London)

Lulu Pfizer, daughter of Charles Pfizer Jr, and first wife of Major General Spencer Edmund Hollond CB, CMG, DSO (missing)

The daughters of Dallas Bache Pratt (Katharine, later Mrs Lycurgus Winchester 1902, and Constance, later Mrs Walter Stillman 1904)

George Lockhart Rives (1915, Columbia University)

William Culver Roberts Jr who had published the immensely popular The Boy’s Account of It: A Chronicle of Foreign Travel by an Eight-Year Old in 1909

Cornelia Ruppert, of the New York brewing family, posthumously, the first wife of the conductor Nahan Franko (missing)

Count Antoine Seilern alone, and with his two older brothers Charles and Oswald when children, their mother Antoinette, aunt Carola Woerishoffer and grandmother, Mrs Charles Woerishoffer

Susan Steell, daughter of dramatist and writer Willis Steell and friend of Katharine Hepburn (missing)

Natica Terry, later Countess Stanislas de Castellane, and her mother Madame Francesco Terry y Sanchez of the Château de Rochecotte, France (Private Collection, London)

Mrs Benjamin Thaw (1915) and Alexander Blair Thaw (posthumously, 1918) (missing)

Mr and Mrs William Scheide and Mr and Mrs John H Scheide (apparently in Princeton, New Jersey)

William Weightman (manufacturing chemist, posthumously) of Philadelphia, and his daughter Mrs Anne Walker (later Mrs Frederic Courtland Penfield) with her niece Mrs Richard Waln Meirs (all missing)

Mr and Mrs Henri P Wertheim (both missing)

William Henry White (Lotos Club, New York)

Miss Olive Whitman as a baby (Preservation Society, Newport) and her father Senator Charles S Whitman (New York State Capitol at Albany)

Captain Gilbert C Wiltse, who raised the US flag on Honolulu in January 1893 (missing)

Mrs Clark Williams (Williams College, MA)

Lady Frederick Williams-Taylor (1917) of Montreal, grandmother of Depression-era debutante Brenda Frazier (missing)

Political figures