Countess Klára Fáy de Fáj

Countess Klára Anna (Mária) Fáy de Fáj (1906 to c. 1990) was a Hungarian noblewoman, the sitter for György Rauscher’s last completed painting: the 1930 full-length portrait painted at the Pálffy-Daun estate near Bicske, shortly before his death.

She was Hungarian-born, not English-born, which corrects the description in the standard monograph.

Who she was

Klára Fáy de Fáj was born on 16 November 1906 at Kurtakeszi, the daughter of Baron István Fáy de Fáj and Baroness Hilda Baranyay. On 18 March 1927, at Kurtakeszi, she married Count József Pálffy-Daun, of the estate near Bicske; the marriage ended in divorce in 1938.

Her death date is not firmly established and is given here as c. 1990.

The correction

Számadó’s monograph describes the sitter of the 1930 portrait as “angol származású” (of English origin) (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 15). The archive’s genealogical research identifies her instead as the Hungarian-born Countess Klára Anna Fáy de Fáj.

The likely source of the confusion is that a later wife of Count József Pálffy-Daun, Johanna Gollop, was British; but that marriage took place in 1949, almost two decades after Rauscher’s 1930 portrait. This correction is one of the archive’s contested-fact entries (see /methodology).

The Rauscher portrait

Rauscher painted her at Bicske in 1930, his last completed work (see /biography/final-months-and-afterlife). Her photograph had appeared in Sport im Bild in December 1928, so the sequence may have run from a photo seen in Berlin to the live sitting in Hungary. The work record is at /works/palffy-daun-1930.