Emily Chadbourne
Sitter in 3 portraits
Lady Ottoline Morrell; Emily Chadbourne; Dorelia McNeill; Augustus John
possibly by Philip Edward Morrell
cream-toned vintage snapshot print, May 1909
NPG Ax140133
Emily Chadbourne; Mrs Kochlin; Dorelia McNeill; Augustus John
by Lady Ottoline Morrell
vintage snapshot print, June 1909
NPG Ax140137
by Lady Ottoline Morrell
cream-toned vintage snapshot print, October 1909
NPG Ax140154
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Margaret Farrell
13 March 2021, 14:35
EMILY CRANE CHADBOURNE
Emily Chadbourne was my great-aunt, the younger sister of my grandmother, Frances Crane Lillie. They were daughters of Richard Teller Crane, a wealthy Chicago businessman who founded Crane Company in the late 19th century. I knew ‘Aunt Em’ when she occasionally visited my grandmother – a rather formidable lady with a somewhat affected voice. She would visit with her chauffeur and often with her friend Ellen LaMotte with whom she had lived in a ‘Boston marriage’ from 1914 onwards. She gave lavish presents mainly of jewellery which she had collected on her travels, and she taught me how to pack a suitcase, using tissue paper or scarves between layers. When I was newly married in 1952 she gave us a big cheque, and also invited us to her house, Stone Ridge, in the Hudson valley, and treated us to yet more presents. She later bequeathed this house to my youngest aunt’s former husband, Bill Walton, whom she had got to know in Washington, where he was a close friend of the Kennedys. Emily was a serious art lover, and she also donated many art works to the Isabella Gardner museum in Boston and the Art Institute in Chicago.
Her friend Ellen LaMotte was a distinguished woman – trained as a nurse, who was a socialist and suffragist, who nursed casualties in World War I and published an account called The Backwash of War (published recently by John Hopkins University press) as well as other writings. The two ladies travelled extensively, including a year in Asia, and became friends with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas in Paris. They both became involved with the League of Nations in the crusade against the opium trade in the 1920’s. For many years they lived in Paris and London and in 1931 returned to the USA and lived in Washington until La Motte’s death in 1961.
Margaret Farrell Clark
Grantchester, Cambridge