Both de Laszlo and Sargent were both besieged with commissions to paint and/or draw many of the sons of the aristocracy and the landed gentry as they prepared to head off to War (WWI) or were home for their leaves.  This portrait was reproduced in Gervase Jackson-Stops, ed. The Treasure Houses of Britain: Five Hundred Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting. 1985.

James Robert Dundas McEwen (1896-1916) was the son of Robert Finnie McEwen, a lawyer from Edinburgh.  The McEwens were a prosperous family who had purchased Marchmont, a William Adam house in Berwickshire, and the shooting lodge of Bardrochat, Ayreshire.  In this portrait, which Jackson-Stops calls 'intensely romantic,' de Laszlo painted McEwen in his uniforms as a Royal Scots Fusilier.  James was killed October 12, 1916, in an assault on the village of Ballecourt (on the Somme front).  His father published a memoir (1930), as did many fathers of young sons lost in the Great War, containing many of his letters from James' days at Eton and during the War. This portrait was used as the frontispiece.

Notes 
 

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