Cathleen Mann was born in Newcastle upon Tyne on 31 December 1896 to the Scottish portrait painter Harrington Mann, the second of his three daughters. Her mother was the portraitist and interior director Florence Sabine Pasley.[1][2] Harrington Mann gave Cathleen painting lessons in his London studio, as did the portrait painter Ethel Walker. Walker continued to tutor Mann even while Cathleen was studying at Slade School of Fine Art in London.[3] Walker remained an influence on Mann and the two often exhibited in the same group exhibitions.[4] Mann's art career was put on hold owing to the First World War, when she worked with an ambulance unit.[1]
During the 1930s Mann also engaged in costume design for British films.[6] Her work included The Iron Duke (1935) starring George Arliss[7] and Things to Come (1937) starring Raymond Massey.[6] Mann donated some of her costume design drawings to the Victoria & Albert Museum, where they are on display.[8][9]
During the Second World War, Mann was an official war artist, painting portraits of officers such as Adrian Carton de Wiart and the Allied commanders.[1][3] As well as being reproduced in magazines such as Time, these paintings were exhibited in London and then toured America.[4]
In 1946, she married John Robert Follett, the son of Brigadier-General Gilbert Burrell Spencer Follett, who had been killed in action during the First World War, and Lady Mildred Follet, daughter of Charles Murray, 7th Earl of Dunmore.[10] Follett was a racehorse owner,[1] but died in 1953, aged 46, shortly before Francis Douglas also died.[4] The two deaths seemed to have caused Mann to have a nervous breakdown, but it has been said that during this period she produced some of her best work, from landscapes and child portraits to sculpture and abstract paintings.[3] She befriended the artist Matthew Smith and was influenced by his work. As a result, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography opines that her best work occurred during the last ten years of her life.[1] During this period she experimented with abstract art, drawings of nude models and sculpture.[1]
Mann committed suicide in 1959 by taking an overdose of sleeping pills in her studio on Montpelier Walk, Brompton. Her son said she had recently been diagnosed with another attack of tuberculosis, although the doctor did not think it would be serious. She left a note stating that she was very worried about the illness.[11] Following her death, this epitaph appeared in The Times:
Mr. H. Rowntree Clifford writes – "Many hundreds of people living in the dock district of south West Ham during the September bombing of 1940 owe their lives to the determination and courage of the late Cathleen Mann. As Marchioness of Queensberry she used her name and the strength of her personality to break through official difficulties and to commandeer transport by both road and rail to carry numbers of helpless and in some cases crippled people to safety. I remember the humble duty she offered to those who were deprived of their families."[12]
Filmography in costume design
1937: Backstage
1936: Forbidden Music
1936: Things to Come (credited as The Marchioness of Queensberry)
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