3015

Mrs Alfred Duggan, née Grace Elvina Hinds 1916

Half-length in semi-profile to the left, wearing mourning dress, with a headdress trimmed with white, and a sapphire cross on a long chain

Oil on canvas, 79.5 x 63.5 cm (31 ¼ x 25 in.)

Inscribed lower right: P. A. de László / LONDON. 1916. III. 14   

Laib L8337(771) / C7(16) Mrs. Duggan

NPG Album 1915-16, p. 93 and NPG Album 1917-21, p. 40

Sitters’ Book II, f. 2: Grace Duggan Feb. 21st 1916.

Kedleston Hall, Scarsdale Collection (The National Trust), Derbyshire

De László painted two portraits of the sitter: first the present one, in 1916, followed by a work which the sitter’s new husband, Lord Curzon, apparently disliked. That portrait, most probably painted in 1917-18, depicted the sitter in a white evening gown. Returned to the artist, it remained in his possession on his death and is untraced [3046]. Lady Curzon was also painted by John Singer Sargent in 1925.

In the sitter’s memoirs she recalls de László’s paintings: “a full length of me in a white evening dress, wearing a tiara [sic]…and a sketch portrait of me in my widow’s weeds – the very becoming black bonnet edged and lined with white, which was then de rigeur [sic] for correct mourning, black draperies, and big sapphire pectoral cross.  George adored this picture, and had a special case made for it, so that he could take it with him wherever he went. He very seldom moved for more than a few days without it, and always had it in his room wherever he could see it.” ^[1]

The mourning dress the sitter is wearing in the present portrait was a memorable one, as Colonel Repington, in his entry for 20 January 1916 in The First World War 1914-1918, also writes: “Mrs Duggan was in the most attractive widow’s weeds imaginable. Callaud of Paris makes a specialty of mourning for war widows apparently. These particular weeds included a very pretty hat in crape [sic], with a veil hanging down behind, or rather streamers, and a narrow band of white crape [sic] round the hat next her face, and also under her chin. The dress had a waistcoat of tulle, and open at the neck; in fact she looked like a fascinating nun. Laszlo [sic] has painted her in this dress.”^[2] 

Grace Elvina Triglia Hinds was born in 1879 in Illinois, one of four children of Joseph Monroe Hinds of Texas and his wife, Lucy Triglia, of Anglo-Italian descent, from Buenos Aires. Her family moved to Argentina and there she met her first husband Alfred Duggan whom she married on 1 May 1902. They had three children, Alfred, Hubert and Marcella. In 1906 they moved to England when her husband became the Honorary Attaché to the Argentine Embassy. At the outbreak of the First World War Grace began working for the war effort supporting the Red Cross and Queen Mary’s Sewing Guild. She also established her own convalescent home for Belgian officers. It was during this period that she met her future second husband, Lord Curzon. In 1915 Alfred Duggan died of pneumonia. On New Year’s Day 1917, Grace married George Nathaniel Curzon, Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, at Lambeth Palace Chapel in London, as his second wife.

Lord and Lady Curzon were to share many interests, including his love of fine furniture and the arts, his political career and the restoration and upkeep of their homes as well as planning and planting in their parks and gardens. Lady Curzon worked hard in being a supportive wife and a talented and generous hostess. She loved playing golf and riding but Lord Curzon was precluded from both of these by a chronically bad back from which he had suffered since his youth. However he did come to share her interest in horse racing; she became the owner of a number of racehorses and had some considerable successes with them in the 1920s. In 1922, she was created a GBE (Dame Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire). Lord Curzon died of complications after a sudden haemorreage in March 1925 without a son to succeed to the titles conferred on him.^[3] The lease of Hackwood Park, in Hampshire, expired in 1926, but his widow renewed it, not wishing to live at Kedleston and preferring it to Montacute. Curzon had left her the long lease of Montacute in his will, but she gave it up in 1929, just as she relinquished Carlton House Terrace, selling Curzon’s collection of portraits, in 1931.

After she had fulfilled her period of mourning, she renewed her interest in racing, often staying at Newmarket and Goodwood with friends. She supervised the refurbishing and redecoration of Hackwood, made a new golf course and re-organised the shoot there.  She continued to entertain on a generous scale, welcoming her three children’s friends as well as many of her own friends and acquaintances from the political and literary circles that had surrounded her married life.  She died on 29 June 1958.

PROVENANCE:  

Bequeathed by the sitter to Richard, 2nd Viscount Scarsdale;

Francis, 3rd Viscount Scarsdale, Kedleston Hall;

Acquired by The National Trust with the aid of The National Heritage Memorial Fund when Lord Curzon donated Kedleston to The National Trust in 1987

EXHIBITED:          

•Grafton Galleries, London, 28th exhibition of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Engravers, 1922

•Hôtel Charpentier, Paris, Exposition P.A. László, 1931, no. 37

LITERATURE:        

•The Patrician, vol. 8, no. 25, Summer 1917 number, p. 39, ill.

•The Studio Magazine, vol. LXXI (71), London, 1917, pp. 117-119, ill. [The International Studio, September 1917]

•Repington, Colonel, The First World War 1914-1918, II volumes, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston and New York, 1920, p. 108

•Rutter, Owen, Portrait of a Painter, London, 1939, p. 305

•Curzon of Kedleston, Grace, Marchioness, Reminiscences, London, 1955, frontispiece and pp. 87-88

•Abdy, Jane, The Souls, London, 1984, p. 29

•Antram, Nicholas & Gervase Jackson-Stops, Kedleston Hall, 1988 (and successive editions), p. 52, no. 260 (erroneously, as “apparently in the habit of a nursing order”)

•Hart-Davis, Duff, in collaboration with Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, De László: His Life and Art, Yale University Press, 2010, p. 149

CC 2008