Marion Margaret Violet Lindsay
Encyclopedia
- See Margaret Lindsay (1726 - 1782)Margaret Lindsay (1726 - 1782)Margaret Lindsay was the brown-eyed eldest daughter of Sir Alexander Lindsay of Evelick. She is notable as a member of the Clan Murray, largely pro-Jacobite in sympathies at this time , but also including pro-Hanoverians such as William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield...
for the wife of Allan Ramsay, and Margaret LindsayMargaret LindsayMargaret Lindsay was an American film actress. Her time as a Warner Bros. contract player during the 1930s was particularly productive...
for the film actress also of this name.
Violet Lindsay Manners, Duchess of Rutland (7 March 1856 – 22 December 1937) was a British artist and noblewoman.
Family
She was the second daughter of Charles Hugh Lindsay (1816–1889, son of the twenty-fourthJames Lindsay, 24th Earl of Crawford
James Lindsay, 24th Earl of Crawford and 7th Earl of Balcarres was an Earl in the Scottish peerage.James Lindsay was born on 24 April 1783 at Balcarres, Fife to Alexander Lindsay, 23rd Earl of Crawford and inherited the title of 7th Earl of Balcarres on his father's death in 1825...
Earl of Crawford
Earl of Crawford
The title Earl of Crawford is one of the most ancient extant titles in Great Britain, having been created in the Peerage of Scotland for Sir David Lindsay in 1398. It is the premier earldom recorded on the Union Roll.The title has a very complex history...
, a soldier and a courtier) and Emilia Anne Browne (d. 1873, the daughter of the dean
Dean (religion)
A dean, in a church context, is a cleric holding certain positions of authority within a religious hierarchy. The title is used mainly in the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church.-Anglican Communion:...
of Lismore
Lismore, Scotland
Lismore is a partially Gaelic speaking island in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. This fertile, low-lying island was once a major centre of Celtic Christianity, with a monastery founded by Saint Moluag and the seat of the Bishop of Argyll.-Geography:...
). Violet had four brothers and two sisters, though all but two of these siblings (except two of the brothers) died in infancy or childhood, and had the aesthete Sir Coutts Lindsay
Coutts Lindsay
Sir Coutts Lindsay, 2nd Baronet , was a British artist and watercolourist.-Life:Lindsay was the eldest son of Lieutenant-General Sir James Lindsay, son of the Hon. Robert Lindsay, second son of James Lindsay, 5th Earl of Balcarres...
as a distant cousin.
Life
The first signs of Lindsay's artistic talent surfaced in her private education. Her family supported her gifts, underwriting a lengthy visit to Italy. However, she never received any formal training.Violet was one of the first exhibitors of both drawings (of the men and women of her social circle, in silver-point or pencil) and sculptures at Sir Coutts' new Grosvenor Gallery
Grosvenor Gallery
The Grosvenor Gallery was an art gallery in London founded in 1877 by Sir Coutts Lindsay and his wife Blanche. Its first directors were J. Comyns Carr and Charles Hallé...
(opened by him in 1877), and continued to exhibit extensively her whole life at all the major British galleries (including the Fine Art Society
Fine Art Society
The Fine Art Society is an art dealership with two premises, one in New Bond Street, London and the other in Edinburgh . It was formed in 1876...
, the Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
, and the New Gallery
New Gallery (London)
The New Gallery was an art gallery founded at 121 Regent Street W., London, in 1888 by J. Comyns Carr and Charles Edward Hallé. Carr and Hallé had been co-directors of Sir Coutts Lindsay's Grosvenor Gallery, but resigned from that troubled gallery in 1887....
) as well as in France and the United States. She also published a selection of her portraits, in 1900, as "Portraits of Men and Women". A reviewer of an exhibition of her drawings at the Brook Street Art Galleries, London, in 1925, wrote:
- ‘Her style is particularly suited to the interpretation of feminine beauty and elegance, but she usually achieves considerable success in her delineations of men’ (The ConnoisseurThe ConnoisseurThe Connoisseur The Connoisseur The Connoisseur (by Mr. Town [pseud.], Critic, and Censor-General. 2 vols. 140 nos. (31 January 1754 – 30 September 1756), was a London weekly eighteenth century newspaper founded and chiefly run by George Colman the Elder and the parodist Bonnell Thornton as a...
, 188).
Despite such praise, her reputation suffered because of her rank, bringing accusations of dilettantism, which she rebuffed, thinking of herself a professional.
She was one of the central figures of the Souls
The Souls
The Souls were a small, loosely-knit but distinctive social group in England, from 1885 to about 1920. Their members included many of the most distinguished English politicians and intellectuals....
, the group of aristocrats which formed in the 1870s-1890s, held together by their intellectual interests, avant-garde artistic taste, and cultural sophistication. Many of them produced portraits of Violet, including GF Watts and JJ Shannon
James Jebusa Shannon
Sir James Jebusa Shannon , Anglo-American artist, was born in Auburn, New York, and at the age of eight was taken by his parents to Canada....
, and she was regarded as their most talented practical artist and the greatest beauty of the type they most admired - auburn hair, pale complexion, hooded eyes, very slim figure, and Aesthetic
Aestheticism
Aestheticism was a 19th century European art movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design...
-style clothes of faded colours and soft drapings. Mrs Patrick Campbell
Mrs Patrick Campbell
Mrs Patrick Campbell was a British stage actress.-Early life and marriages:Campbell was born Beatrice Stella Tanner in Kensington, London, to John Tanner and Maria Luigia Giovanna, daughter of Count Angelo Romanini...
once described her as ‘the most beautiful thing I ever saw’. However, she also pushed the borders of what was acceptably bohemian, even among the Souls, by making some of her closest friendships with actors such as Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree
Herbert Beerbohm Tree
Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was an English actor and theatre manager.Tree began performing in the 1870s. By 1887, he was managing the Haymarket Theatre, winning praise for adventurous programming and lavish productions, and starring in many of its productions. In 1899, he helped fund the...
and his wife and three daughters, encouraging her own daughters to take walk-on parts in his productions, and generally feeling entirely at home in the theatre. Ellen Terry
Ellen Terry
Dame Ellen Terry, GBE was an English stage actress who became the leading Shakespearean actress in Britain. Among the members of her famous family is her great nephew, John Gielgud....
recorded in her memoirs:
- "The lovely Lady Granby (now Duchess of Rutland) was [at the exhibition]—reminding me, as always, of the reflection of something in water on a misty day. When she was Miss Violet Lindsay she did a drawing of me as PortiaPortia (Merchant of Venice)Portia is the heroine of William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. A rich, beautiful, and intelligent heiress, she is bound by the lottery set forth in her father's will, which gives potential suitors the chance to choose between three caskets composed of gold, silver and lead...
in the doctor's robes, which is I think very like me, as well as having all the charming qualities of her well-known pencil portraits."
Violet converted 16 Arlington Street into a hospital for the duration of the First World War, selling it on her husband's death in 1925 and moving to 34 Chapel Street, Belgrave Square
Belgrave Square
Belgrave Square is one of the grandest and largest 19th century squares in London, England. It is the centrepiece of Belgravia, and was laid out by the property contractor Thomas Cubitt for the 2nd Earl Grosvenor, later the 1st Marquess of Westminster, in the 1820s. Most of the houses were occupied...
, London. There she had a new studio built and continued to work, exhibiting continuously up until November 1937. Chips Channon
Henry Channon
Sir Henry "Chips" Channon was an American-born British Conservative politician, author and diarist. Channon moved to England in 1920 and became strongly anti-American, feeling that American cultural and economic views threatened traditional European and British civilisation. He wrote extensively...
commented on a 1935 ball at Belvoir Castle
Belvoir Castle
Belvoir Castle is a stately home in the English county of Leicestershire, overlooking the Vale of Belvoir . It is a Grade I listed building....
, Leicestershire, that:
- "old Violet Duchess looked the best, tired, eighty, and in white; she was a romantic, rather triste figure in a castle where she had reigned so long".
She died at her Chapel Street home in 1937 after an operation, and was buried at Belvoir.
Marriage and family
On 25 November 1882 Violet Lindsay married, at St George's, Hanover Square, London, Henry John Brinsley MannersHenry Manners, 8th Duke of Rutland
Henry John Brinsley Manners, 8th Duke of Rutland KG TD , known as Henry Manners until 1888 and styled Marquess of Granby between 1888 and 1906, was a British peer and Conservative politician.-Background:...
(1852–1925), who in 1888 became Marquess of Granby (making her Lady Granby), and in 1906 succeeded his father as 8th Duke of Rutland
Duke of Rutland
Earl of Rutland and Duke of Rutland are titles in the peerage of England, derived from Rutland, a county in the East Midlands of England. The Earl of Rutland was elevated to the status of Duke in 1703 and the titles were merged....
(with her as Duchess of Rutland). The pair were opposites - Manners was handsome in a conventional way, Conservative, aristocratic, and with more interest in hunting and the chorus line at the theatre than in the arts, whereas she was seen as beautiful and bohemian - and, though she gave birth to one daughter and two sons (Lord Haddon, and another) to guarantee his title's succession, Violet looked outside the marriage for comfort. Disraeli's former private secretary, Montague Corry, 1st Baron Rowton (1838–1903) apparently fathered her second daughter, Violet (Letty), and Harry Cust (aka Henry John Cockayne, 1861–1917) the third, Diana
Lady Diana Cooper
Lady Diana Cooper, Viscountess Norwich was an English socialite and actress.-Birth and youth:Born Lady Diana Olivia Winifred Maud Manners, she was officially the youngest daughter of the 8th Duke of Rutland and his wife, the former Violet Lindsay, but Lady Diana's real father was widely supposed...
.
However, her eldest son's death at the age of nine in 1894 devastated her, and she poured her grief into producing his tomb sculptures herself. The plaster cast
Plaster cast
A plaster cast is a copy made in plaster of another 3-dimensional form. The original from which the cast is taken may be a sculpture, building, a face, a fossil or other remains such as fresh or fossilised footprints – particularly in palaeontology .Sometimes a...
for this work - her son, reclining on an elaborate base decorated with relief portraits of his mother's family -was considered by her as her best work. (She kept it in her London house until - a month before she died - it was accepted by the Tate Gallery
Tate Gallery
The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...
). Her other son at least survived the slaughter of World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
(being kept away from the front, and marrying into another Souls family), though her daughter Violet's husband, Hugo Francis Charteris, Lord Elcho (born on 28 December 1884), was killed in the Egyptian campaign
Sinai and Palestine Campaign
The Sinai and Palestine Campaigns took place in the Middle Eastern Theatre of World War I. A series of battles were fought between British Empire, German Empire and Ottoman Empire forces from 26 January 1915 to 31 October 1918, when the Armistice of Mudros was signed between the Ottoman Empire and...
on 23 April 1916, and most of her daughter Diana's friends and suitors died on the western front.