111228

Portrait drawing

Cecil Nona Kerr 1909

Head only, looking full face to the viewer, wearing a white high-collared shirt

Chalk on paper, 35.5 x 29.2 cm (14 x 11 ½ in.)

Inscribed lower left: P.A. de László / 909 may / London

Sitters’ Book I, f. 78: Nona Kerr

Private Collection

The present chalk head sketch of Nona Kerr is dated May 1909 and was probably executed about the same time de László made a drawing and two paintings of Prince Louis of Battenberg [3295] [3464] & [3469], who signed the artist’s sitters’ book on 25 April 1909.^[1]

Cecil Nona Kerr was born in London on 11 March 1875, the ninth and youngest child of Admiral Lord Frederick Kerr (1818-1896), a son of the 6th Marquess of Lothian and Emily Maitland (1827-1891). Her elder brother Mark was an early shipmate of Prince Louis of Battenberg (later 1st Marquess of Milford Haven) and the families had become close. Following the death of her widowed father, whom Nona had nursed in his last years but who left little money, Prince Louis asked if one of the three unmarried daughters would agree to come to Germany to be lady-in-waiting to his wife Victoria, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Nona accepted and took up the post in 1897, and soon became “the mainstay of the Battenberg family.”^[2] She remained with Princess Victoria, doubling as governess to the Battenberg children, for nineteen years. All the family confided in her and Princess Victoria described her as her lifelong “closest friend.”^[3] 

On 24 January 1915 Nona married her childhood friend Richard Crichton (1879–1962), whom she had nursed after he was wounded in the Boer War. That June she discovered she would be unable to have children but the marriage was a long and happy one and Dick Crichton too became a cherished member of the Battenberg inner circle. He was painted by de László in May 1915 [111031].

After Nona’s death on 28 December 1960 Queen Louise of Sweden [3481] (‘Our Queen’ as Nona always referred to her^[4]) wrote to her brother Lord Louis Mountbatten: “For beloved Nona we must not grieve. She was so old & mercifully was spared a long illness. How my heart aches for poor lonely Dick! For you and me darling Nona was our last link with our childhood. How we will miss her.”^[5]

LITERATURE:

•Field, Katherine ed., Transcribed by Susan de Laszlo, The Diaries of Lucy de László Volume I: (1890-1913), de Laszlo Archive Trust, 2019, p. 176, ill.

CWS 2016