Lucy Christiana ('Lucile') (née Sutherland), Lady Duff Gordon

1 portrait of Lucy Christiana ('Lucile') (née Sutherland), Lady Duff Gordon

© National Portrait Gallery, London

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Lucy Christiana ('Lucile') (née Sutherland), Lady Duff Gordon

by Bassano Ltd
bromide print, 1904
7 5/8 in. x 5 3/4 in. (194 mm x 146 mm) overall
Purchased, 1996
Photographs Collection
NPG x85153

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  • Bassano Ltd (active 1901-1962), Photographers. Artist or producer associated with 42746 portraits.

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  • Pepper, Terence, High Society: Photographs 1897-1914, 1998 (accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from 30 January to 21 June 1998), p. 56 Read entry

    After divorce from her first husband in 1890, Lucy Sutherland started dressmaking for friends and opened her own house. Her costumes for Lord Rosslyn’s amateur charity production of Diplomacy (1895) produced her first success. She designed a costume for the society leader Mrs Willie James to wear to the Devonshire House Ball, and Margot Asquith’s interest led to commissions from the Souls, including the Duchess of Rutland, Lady Desborough and Lady Wemyss. Lucy first designed costumes for the professional stage in 1897, for Irene Vanbrugh and Mary Moore in Charles Wyndham’s The Liars, and in the same year she launched Maison Lucile in Hanover Square. In 1900 she married Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon. She designed stage costumes for Zena Dare, Maie Ash and Ellaline Terriss for The Catch of the Season (1904), but her most celebrated designs were for Lily Elsie in The Merry Widow (1907). She also introduced the mannequin parade to fashion shows and opened branches of her business in New York (1909), Chicago and Paris (1911). She sold it in 1918.

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Events of 1904back to top

Current affairs

Britain and France sign the Entente Cordiale, an agreement which resolves a number of longstanding colonial disputes (including a Declaration respecting Egypt and Morocco), signalling growing anxiety about the risk of future German aggression. Although not militarily binding, the agreement, negotiated between French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé, and Lord Lansdowne, the British Foreign Secretary, establishes a diplomatic understanding between the two countries.

Art and science

J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan is first performed at the Duke of York's Theatre in London. Charting the fantastical adventures of Peter, 'the boy who never grew up', the Darling children and the villainous Captain Hook in Neverland, many adaptations have been made of the story.
The painter Gwen John settles in Paris, where she becomes the lover and model of the sculptor Auguste Rodin, modelling for his sculpture Muse.

International

Japan attacks the Russian Navy at Port Arthur, sparking the Russo-Japanese war. Hostility was prompted by the rival imperialist ambitions of the Russian and Japanese empires in Manchuria, North East China, and Korea, considered by Japan to be an essential buffer against colonisation by Western Powers. Japan wins a series of victories against Russia which transforms the balance of power in East Asia, and undermines the Tsar's rule in Russia.

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