Unseen portrait of duchess goes on sale

IT COULD be a poignant scene from the Emmy award-winning TV drama Downton Abbey: a beautiful woman dressed in white ministers to wounded soldiers in France in September 1915.

But this nurse is not an actress. She is Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, an aristocratic, Scottish-born beauty, society hostess, writer and philanthropist, who established a tent hospital, first at Malo-les-Bains near Dunkirk, then at Bourbourg.

The previously unseen portrait of the duchess and some of her patients is one of ten oil paintings by French artist Victor Tardieu depicting the Bourbourg field hospital which will be sold at Bonhams in Edinburgh on Thursday.Men being treated for injuries sustained in the trenches are portrayed with sympathy and delicacy by Tardieu, and the ten works are important despite being small, explains head of pictures Chris Brickley.

Tardieu clearly admired the “uncommonly tall”, flame-haired Millicent. The painting is dedicated in French, “with grateful and respectful homage from a simple/humble soldier” and is estimated to fetch upwards of £1,500. The series could make ten times that, as keen interest is anticipated from museums.

“They are a unique record of the work done by a courageous woman,” says Brickley, adding that the paintings are among a number of lots, including furniture, from the Dunrobin estate, Sutherland.

Born in Dysart House, Fife, in 1867, Millicent Fanny St Clair-Erskine was the eldest daughter of the 4th Earl of Rosslyn and Blanche Fitzroy. At the age of 17, she married Cromartie Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, who inherited the title of Duke of Sutherland in 1892, and had four children.

As chatelaine of Stafford House, opposite Buckingham Palace, and Dunrobin Castle, she was one of the most elegant and glamorous women of her day, and John Singer Sargent painted her portrait in 1904.

She was awarded the French Croix de Guerre, the Belgian Royal Red Cross and the British Red Cross for her war work, which included running a Calais hospital until 1918. Her many other charitable projects included the founding of the Cripples Aid Society and a rural technical school at Golspie, plus attempts to revive the home-spun woollen industry in the Highland and islands.