[1] John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925) was the most successful portrait painter of his era, as well as a gifted landscape painter and watercolorist. A friend of the family.
[2] Alfred William Parsons RA (1847 – 1920) was an English artist: illustrator, landscape painter and garden designer.
[3] Gerald Callcott Horsley (1862 – 1917), Crowborough, East Sussex was a British architect and draughtsman who lived in London.
[4] Violet Sargent (1870-1955) was John Singer Sargent’s youngest sister. After studying at the Accademia delle Belle Arti, she married Francis Ormond.
[5] Mary Mackay (1855 – 1924), known by her pseudonym Marie Corelli was an English novelist. She enjoyed a period of great literary success from the publication of her first novel in 1886 until World War I. Sales of Corelli’s novels exceeded the combined sales of popular contemporaries, including Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling, although critics often derided her work as “the favourite of the common multitude”.
[6] Maurice Henry Hewlett, was an English historical novelist, poet and essayist.
[7] Edwin Austin Abbey RA (1852 – 1911) was an American muralist, illustrator, and painter.
[8] Martina Sofia Helena Bergman-Österberg (1849 – 1915) was a Swedish-born physical education instructor and women’s suffrage advocate who spent most of her working life in Britain.
[9] Maud Allan (born Beulah Maude Durrant, 1873 – 1956) was a Canadian pianist-turned-actress, dancer and choreographer who is remembered for her “impressionistic mood settings”.
[10] “Light Freights” from W. W. Jacobs. English author of short stories and novels (1863-1943).
[11] Arthur Nikisch (1855 – 1922) was a Hungarian conductor who performed internationally, holding posts in Boston, London, Leipzig and—most importantly—Berlin. He was considered an outstanding interpreter of the music of Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Liszt. Johannes Brahms praised Nikisch’s performance of his Fourth Symphony as “quite exemplary, it’s impossible to hear it any better.”
[12] Mark Lancelot Symons (1887 –1935) was the son of the artist William Christian Symons. His father had converted to Roman Catholicism. The family was stauchly Catholic. Mark’s brother, Phillip, became a Benedictine monk and served as organist at Downside. Whistler, Sargent and Brabazon were family friends.
[13] Hermann Appenrodt described himself as the “most distinguished German delicatessen in London” and as the “largest importer of all types of German delicacies”.
[14] Eustace Hamilton Miles (1868 – 1948) was a British real tennis player who competed in the 1908 Summer Olympics, restaurateur, and a diet guru who made his name selling health products and health advice to Edwardian Britons. He was the owner of a vegetarian restaurant in Chandos Street, Charing Cross that was alleged to have served more than a thousand diners a day.
[15] Helen Allingham RWS (née Paterson; 1848 – 1926) was an English watercolourist and illustrator of the Victorian era.
The Diaries of my Great-Great-Aunt Kate 