Duchess Millicent paintings fetch £27,500 at auction
A moving series of canvasses of soldiers convalescing during the First World War and featuring a previously unseen portrait of the Duchess of Sutherland ministering to the troops, made £27,500 when it was sold at Bonhams, Edinburgh, this week.
The pictures, which had been estimated at £1,000-1,500 have gone to a London buyer.
They were painted by the French artist Victor Tardieu. During the First World War he fought in the trenches and it was in September 1915, while stationed at Bourbourg near Dunkirk, that he painted the ten memorable images of wounded soldiers on the mend.
Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, was an indomitable woman who became passionately involved in the war effort tending to the wounded on the front.
Among other initiatives, she established a field hospital at Bourbourg and it was there that Tardieu painted her and some of her patients.
One of the paintings shows the Duchess in her nursing uniform and Tardieu dedicated it to her with the words, "with grateful and respectful homage from a humble soldier."
Although little known in this country, Victor Tardieu is famous as the father of Vietnamese modern art, having introduced Western influences to the traditional painting of Indochina in the 1920s.
He established the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine in Hanoi in 1925, becoming its first director and remaining associated with the school until his death in 1937. The paintings were sold as part of a small collection of items from Dunrobin Castle, the seat of the Countess of Sutherland and the Clan Sutherland.
