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This portrait of Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, Duchess of Marlborough, shows her in 1916, ten years after her informal separation from Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Earl of Marlborough.[1] Balsan was one of several American heiresses who moved to England to marry into aristocratic families of ancient lineage but dwindling fortunes. Her father was William Kissam Vanderbilt, whose fortune was estimated by contemporaries at a staggering $100-$150 million.

At her debut in 1894 Balsan was besieged by suitors of the highest ‘calibre’, including a future president of France. For the Vanderbilts – as for many newly moneyed American families – nothing could confer status like a marriage into the upper echelons of the English aristocracy. Balsan’s family pushed for her to marry Spencer-Churchill, who in turn could not resist the lure of the Vanderbilts’ unbridled wealth. Yet, finding the elite that she had married into cold and inward-looking, she would later write, ‘I spent the morning of my wedding day in tears and alone; no one came near me’.[2]

McEvoy worked for the Marlborough family on several occasions. He painted the ninth duke’s first cousin, Winston Churchill, whom Balsan later recalled as having provided the only joy and excitement during her time at Blenheim, and his sister-in-law Gwendoline Churchill. He also made two other likenesses of Balsan, which remain at the Marlborough family seat, Blenheim Palace. In stark contrast to the bright colours that she wears in these earlier portraits, here she is shown dressed sombrely in black and white (described with great chromatic subtlety by McEvoy’s brush).

Separation from the duke proved to be at once personally liberating and socially crippling. From early childhood she was taught to be submissive but was now free to pursue her own interests. Elected as the first female member of the London County Council, she used her celebrity status to draw attention to the Women’s Municipal Party. The year this painting was completed she gave the Priestley Lecture at the National Health Society.[3] Whilst earlier portraits celebrated her predominantly as a society beauty who had fulfilled her role in producing a male heir (or, as she herself so succinctly put it, ‘an heir and a spare’), here McEvoy portrays a ‘new woman’ – freed from the shackles of a loveless marriage.

[1] Two years later Balsan sought and obtained a formal divorce from Marlborough from the Pope and married again.

[2] Vanderbilt Balsan, C. 1953. The Glitter and the Gold. London: William Heinemann, p.41.

[3] As reported in ‘The Hospital’, 8 July 1916, p.357.