From: angelathirkell.org
ANGELA [MACKAIL] THIRKELL (1890 - 1961) Angela Margaret Mackail was born on January 30, 1890 at 27 Young Street, Kensington Square, London. Her grandfather was Sir Edward Burne-Jones the pre-Raphaelite painter and partner in the design firm of Morris and Company for whom he designed many stained glass windows - seven of which are in St Margaret's Church in Rottingdean, West Sussex. Her grandmother was Georgiana Macdonald, one of a precocious family which included among others, Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, and Rudyard Kipling. Angela's brother, Denis Mackail, was also a prolific and successful novelist. Angela's mother, Margaret Burne-Jones, married John Mackail - an administrator at the Ministry of Education and Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
(angelathirkell.org )
From: Scott Thomas Buckle
sc ot tbu ckle@btopenworld.com
Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2005
I enclosed a scan of Sargent's 1915 charcoal portrait drawing of Angela Thirkell [which was her married name later after Sargent drew her]. It's from an A3 photocopy I made from the NPG archive about 12 years ago, so I had to do a bit of cut & paste to get it all into a single jpeg. A small image is in the Leeds 1979 cat (no74) listing the owner as Simon MacInnes, one of her descendents. I was a little surprised not to find her on your site, although you do mention her under her maiden name of Mackail. You may have seen photos of her as a child with her painterly grandfather; she was also the model for the heads of two of the figures in his Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon, including the harp-playing maid on the left of this detaail -- here
She later became a novelist and now has her own fan club - here
although it looks like they had similar problems fitting the Sargent image of her under their scanner.
Yours Thirkelly,
StB
Special thanks to Scott Thomas Buckle, from London, a friend of the JSS Gallery, for sending me the image and information.