English: Painting of Ohio Governor Myron Herrick, on display as part of the "Jazz Age" exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States.

Philip de László (1869-1937) was born Fülöp Laub into a family of Jewish tailors in Budapest. He left school at nine to work as a theatrical scene-painter. He worked for a time as a porcelain-painter before becoming apprenticed to a local photographer coloring prints. He later enrolled at the National Academy of Art, and then studied painting in Munic and Paris. He changed his surname to László in 1891, and converted to Catholicism in 1894. László's portrait of Pope Leo XIII earned him a Grand Gold Medal at the Paris International Exhibition in 1900. He married into the Guinness banking family that same year, and converted to Anglicanism. He moved to Vienna in 1903 and then England in 1907.

His reputation was as a society portrait painter. Although a catalogue raisonné has yet to be published, his works number almost 4,000. De László worked in what is known as the "Grand Manner" or "Grand Style" of painting -- an idealized form derived from classical art and the High Renaissance. This aesthetic depicted subjects in life size and full-length, in surroundings that conveyed nobility and elite status.

Myron T. Herrick (1854-1929) was born in Huntington, Ohio, into a farming family. He studied at Oberlin College and Ohio Wesleyan University, but graduated from neither. After working three years at a Cleveland law firm, he was admitted to the bar. He served on the City Council from 1885 to 1888, during which time he co-founded the National Carbon Company (now Eveready Battery, a firm that developed the AA battery and the flashlight). He was a director of the Society for Savings, a major Cleveland bank. Extremely active in Republican politics, he served as the Governor of Ohio from 1904 to 1906. He was defeated for reelection because he opposed Prohibition.

Herrick served as Ambassador to France from 1912 to 1914. He resigned after Woodrow Wilson won the presidency in 1914. But with World War I breaking out, Herrick refused to leave the embassy until his successor arrived. One of the few diplomats to remain in Paris during the war, he looked after the property of other embassies. The French government, which had mostly decamped to Bordeaux, asked him to be their watchman as well. Herrick worked 18 to 20 hour days, helping Americans stranded by the war. He also raised an immense amount of money for hospitals and French war relief. For his efforts, the French gave him the Legion of Honor. Herrick returned to the U.S. in 1916, where he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Senate. When is own lieutenant governor, Warren G. Harding, was elected President in 1920, he offered Herrick the ambassadorship again. Herrick served from 1921 to 1929, dying of a heart attack there.

This oil on canvas painting was made in 1922.