Sitter: Lady Margaret (Frances Susan) Orr-Ewing, née Innes-Kerr (1875-1930).

Biog: Eldest daughter of the 7th Duke of Roxburghe; m (15 July 1898) Major James Alexander Orr-Ewing (killed in action 1900).

Image published in Cool, published by The Fan Museum, Greenwich

The epitome of Reynolds-esque innocent beauty, Lady Margaret Innes-Kerr is seen here in a publicity photograph, made one week before her marriage. The eldest daughter of the 7th Duke of Roxburghe, her husband, Major James Alexander Orr-Ewing was to be killed in action at Kheis in South Africa in 1900, leaving a daughter Millicent, 11 months old.

This image and others from the same sitting, for which negatives are no longer extant, were published up to two years later in The Lady's Pictorial, The Car and Country Life. The backdrop with studio pillar was a standard setting used much by Lafayette for his theatrical portraits as well as for some of his portraits of visiting Indian princes.

For all the assumed innocence and the mass of floral flounces on her gown, Lady Margaret appears to have been slightly faster than her contemporaries, as Lord Curzon reported in a letter to the Secretary of State for India that he had seen a daughter of the Duchess of Roxburghe dancing at the Jubilee Ball in Buckingham Palace “with the Rajah of Kapurthala” – a ruler widely known for his torrid home life.

This tortoiseshell fan with a fine skin leaf painted with ferns and orchids is applied with eight real butterfly wings. It is signed F. Gardon and Poulin, and inscribed in gold along the left guard, Papillons Naturels, and A. Rodien, Paris. Rodien was one of the top éventaillistes retailing in the 1880s and 90s some of the most spectacular fans. Its provenance is having belonged to “a member of the Orr-Ewing family”. Could it have belonged to Lady Margaret? The date of the fan (c. 1895) certainly fits. It is also one of a very small number of fans painted by F. Gardon with Poulin supplying and applying the butterflies. (Another of the Papillons Naturels fans.

In this portrait, Lady Margaret fingers a fan much more in keeping with her unmarried status, with a mother-of-pearl monture, more like the one we illustrate opposite.

Date: 8 July 1898.

Occasion: Publicity photograph taken a week before her marriage.

Location: The Lafayette studio, 179 New Bond Street, London, W.

Descr: TQL standing.

Costume: -

Costume Designer: -

Costume Supplier: -

Jewellery: -

Furniture & Props: Painted backdrop with landscape after Reynolds;⁽¹⁾ studio 'stone' column.

Evidence of photographer at work: -

No of poses: 1.

Copyright: V&A

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Biog: Burkes' Peerage.

Occasion: Country Life Illustrated, 30 July 1898, p ?.

Costume: -

Costume Designer: -

Costume Supplier: -

Jewellery: -

Reproduced: Lady's Pictorial, 28 April 1900, p 662; (versions) Country Life Illustrated, 30 July 1898, front page & The Car Illustrated, 25 February 1903, front page.

The version published in Country Life Illustrated, 30 July 1898, front page

1. Backdrop after portrait of Elizabeth Catharine Rivett, Mrs. Carnac, by Sir Joshua Reynolds c. 1775. (The Wallace Collection). (J. Ingamells, The Wallace Collection, Catalogue of Pictures, London, 1985.)