Meet the heiress_ Daisy Leiter (with Lucy Worsley)

Have you heard of a dollar princess? This is the name given to rich American heiresses who came over to Britain at the turn of the 20th century and who made a habit of marrying members of the aristocracy. You know, like in Downton Abbey. He brings a title, she brings a fortune. But is there something a bit reductive about this term? I've come to meet some of the staff and volunteers for English Heritage here at Kenwood in London to learn about one of the real women behind the label. This dollar princess was called Daisy Lighter. You'll be Ella. I am. Hello. Welcome to Kenwood. Thank you for having me. I hear you have princesses inside. Would you like to meet her? I would. Come this way. And here she is. This is the lady I've come to see. Hello, Daisy. Daisy Lighter. What are we looking at, Ella? We are looking at a wonderful and very large portrait I have never seen a more glamorous looking lady, have you? She is very, very glamorous. And I think she knows it as well by the look on her face. It's a very kind of assured, confident portrait. And it was painted when Daisy was only 19, but she was entering society at that time. And it's quite the statement of here I am. What's her backstory then? I've got some newspaper cuttings here. Well, newspapers are actually a kind of interesting way to look at Daisy's life because we try to tease out the fact from the fiction through them. She grew up in Washington. She was one of four children born into a very wealthy family and lived a life of real luxury and excess in America. It says here that her father was in dry goods. Dry goods and I think a bit of real estate as well. So there was a mix, but he amassed an enormous fortune. And this portrait was a gift from Daisy's parents to her when she turned 19. So her sister gets married to an English Lord, Lord Curzon. She does. They go to India. They do. And Daisy starts getting all of these offers of marriage. She does. So this was painted the year before she joins her sister in India in 1899. And it's there that she meets the man who will eventually become her husband five years later. But in that time, she has many, many offers of proposals. And in the Tatler, it was recorded that she was revered in American society because she had the largest number of British proposals and American refusals. That's brilliant. It's great. It's a good one. The most engaged lady in the world. Well, I'm not sure if they were real proposals, though. What do you think? In the newspapers, there's a back and forth between Daisy and her mother, where she refutes that she is engaged to these men, despite the reports of it. Oh, look, here it is. Mrs. Leiter authorizes the statement that her daughter, Miss Daisy Leiter, is not engaged. Is not engaged, exactly. Or to anyone else. I love the papers reporting that she's not going to marry anybody. She said, I don't want to. I'm not going to. It's a kind of fiercely independent statement to make at that time. But I think this is a portrait of a fiercely independent woman. She does end up marrying Henry Howard, who was the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire in 1904, the year that her father died. So it was a very small wedding. So she was actually part of a trend of American heiresses who marry British peers at the time who they desperately needed an injection of cash into their crumbling family homes across the country. And these new money American women provided that cash in exchange for ancient family titles. So there was a lot of stereotyping at the time around these women. But she does appear to have married for love. She certainly had the pick of men at the time. And she did settle down happily with Henry Howard, who was the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire. And they had three sons together. What I like about her story is her power that she had. She had everybody at her feet and she just kept turning them down. Absolutely. And she does appear to be a very powerful and vivacious young woman who had that choice in her life that maybe some other women weren't afforded. So she was very lucky. Ella, what exactly is a dollar princess? It's a controversial term at the time. It was labelled by the British press on these women, these American heiresses who married into the British aristocracy. I think there's quite a lot of controversy around it because it's a loaded term. It infantilises some of these women. It reduces them to the money that they brought into this country, the dollars that they brought over. I guess the term dollar princess implies that they really want to marry British aristocrats too. Yeah. And once you start looking at that stereotype, it starts to crumble because lots of these women, they weren't necessarily significantly more wealthy than the British men that they were marrying. Some of these were true love marriages. For some of them, it was their second or their third marriage. But there are situations like Daisy's where she is young, she is very wealthy and she is marrying a British peer. And I think that's where the stereotype grows from. Daisy, she ended up opening her house, Charlton Park, as a nursing ward during the First World War. She had Belgian refugees there. Brilliant. So Ella, this article here is talking about this painting and it calls her the bewitching Miss Daisy at whose feet all London fell down when they beheld her portrait by Sergeant at the Royal Academy last year. I guess that shows something of the power of the picture, doesn't it? It definitely does. But what we don't know is what she really felt about it. We're not sure. We don't have those words from her, but she certainly is looking very confident and very happy in the portrait itself. And she did bring the portrait with her to Charlton Park when she married. So the fact that it travelled from her family home to stay with her suggests that she was very happy with it. She must've liked it. They like it. So I imagine she did too. Yeah, yeah. I can see John Sergeant has signed his canvas. Tell me about the painter. So this is John Singer Sergeant, who was at the time the leading portraitist in Europe and in America and had a huge clientele. He was enormously popular and was the man to go to if you were a wealthy man or woman and wanted your portrait painted at the time. And he exhibited this painting and was clearly very proud of it and used these opportunities to kind of push his celebrity as an artist. We don't entirely know where it was painted because Sergeant had studios in Boston, in New York and in London. So it's possible that he went to America to paint Daisy or that she came to him in London as many people did at the time. He's known for this style of portraiture that harks back to earlier British portraiture, country house portraiture, like Reynolds, like Gainsborough. But he's painting in a very fluid way. He's painting wet brushstrokes into wet paint. And it has this overall effect of being very fresh, very free, very lively. But when you stand back, it still fits in with the country house aesthetic at the time. So Daisy marries her Earl. Does she live happily ever after? Not entirely. So the marriage seems to have been a very happy one. She marries the 19th Earl of Suffolk and 12th Earl of Berkshire and becomes the Countess through that marriage. And they seem to have been very much in love, had three sons, but despite the fact that she was very wealthy, very privileged, she couldn't avoid the tragedies of the First and Second World War. And sadly, her husband died in Iraq in the First World War and her first son died while he was diffusing a bomb in the Second World War. Oh, very sad. So at that point, she actually, well, it was in the 1940s, she went back and reapplied for American citizenship, renewed it and spent a lot of time in Arizona. What a life. And she died in? She died in 1968 on her way to California. And how has this amazing portrait ended up here at Kenwood House? It ended up here because it came with the Suffolk Collection. So Kenwood is largely formed from two big collections. We have the Ivor Bequest, which is famous for its Dutch Golden Age paintings and also our 18th century English and French paintings. And then there's the Suffolk Collection, which largely lives upstairs. This is Daisy's husband. Yes, it is. So she ends up inheriting these works through the Suffolk line. And it's, I mean, the nucleus of that collection are these fantastic full-length portraits by William Larkin of the Earls of Suffolk. Ella, tell me about this exhibition you've been working on. Yes, so in May, we are opening Heiress, Sergeants' American Portraits. So it's an exhibition exploring this theme of heiresses and dollar princesses through Sergeants' fantastic portraits of these women. And he produced large oil portraits, as we can see, but also fantastic, very intimate, very quick and fresh charcoal portraits as well. And both will be in the exhibition and we'll be using those incredible works as a lens to explore these women's lives in more depth. It's also an opportunity for us to see Daisy alongside some of her compatriots because she's a slight anomaly at Kenwood. She sits sort of outside of the Ivor Bequest and the Suffolk Collection. And at the moment, she's actually on the staircase here as a transition from the Ivor Bequest, which is largely downstairs, up towards the Suffolk Collection that she inherited and donated to the nation. So she's sort of encouraging me to go upstairs and see the paintings that she left to the nation, is she? She is, and I think you should. And Mark will meet you upstairs to talk about the Suffolk Collection more. Thank you so much. Hello. Hello, Lucy. I'm Mark. Welcome to the Upper Hall at Kenwood and to the home of the Suffolk Collection. Thank you. So in this amazing Upper Hall, you have the vestiges of the family that lived here in the 18th century, this beautiful fireplace. But the pictures on the wall are another family and they are Daisy's in-laws, ancestors, the Howard family dating back to the early 1600s in their finery, really showing off their wealth, their status, flaunting it. And they look like they were painted yesterday, but William Larkin, nine pictures in the collection here, gifted by Daisy to hang here. So she's the reason that these paintings are here for us all to enjoy. Absolutely. So the pictures were part of the dynastic property of the Howard family. That's her husband. The Earl of Suffolk and of Berkshire, exactly. And they seem to have been collateral later in life for a loan she made to the family. And then later under the terms of her will, it was enabled that they would be bequeathed to the nation and they were later brought here to Kenwood to hang. So yes, it's Daisy we have to thank for this amazing gift of these pictures. And it's not just these Larkins, there are three other rooms full of beautiful dynastic pictures that the Howard family had acquired over the years. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. And it's free to visit today to Kenwood to come and enjoy all of these as well. So the generosity of the Earl of Iver who bequeathed and saved this place combined with the generosity of Daisy Lighter, Daisy Howard with these pictures now hanging here, what a perfect day out. Yeah. So we're looking here at a lady from the early 17th century in just the most amazing dress. It says attributed to William Larkin, the painter. Tell me about him. Right, well, who's heard of William Larkin? Well, he is a man whose identity was only known as a painter from about the middle of the 20th century. Before then, he was known as the curtain master. Because if you look at this picture, curtains are a major feature. He's big on drapes. There's a look, isn't there, with these gloriously silvery red curtains and this carpet and the furniture. There's a format to the pictures. So he was known as the curtain master. They've all got the same curtains all around the room. Yeah, it's kind of like you're getting the Larkin look. You want the curtains. Definitely want the curtains. Do you want them in green, madam, or would you like them in red? And he probably got the job for his reputation. He would then paint the sitter's likeness, their face, maybe their hands, the more difficult parts. And he would have had a team of presumably men, boys in the studio doing the twiddly bits. You're doing carpets this year, Bill. Next year, if you've done it well, you'll graduate to doing chairs. And then maybe onto the most extraordinary shoes. Shoes! The shoes and the shoe roses, shoe trees. They're beautiful. They're just astonishing, aren't they? So you had your expertise, and William Larkin is a name who really does deserve a reputation today and deserves a name and a voice of his own because these nine pictures we have here at Kenwood are one of the finest collections of his works. And we can be proud of this English painter at a point where English painters were not thick on the ground. Yes, people were quite snooty on the continent, weren't they, about? They were. You had to be Flemish or Italian. No, but here we are, English painter of great renown. Well done, Mr. Larkin. So it's good that he gets a name. Mark, you're awfully knowledgeable. I get the impression that you like volunteering here. I love volunteering at Kenwood. I've been a volunteer here for more than 12 years, and you learn something with each new shift here. And caring for Kenwood is something that is a lifetime mission. I'm also involved in the Friends of Kenwood, work with English Heritage to fund and look after this wonderful place. And it's a wonderful privilege. I can't recommend volunteering highly enough. It's great rooms, great art, great stories. And the more you dig into it, the more there is to celebrate. May I take a little tour around? As long as you don't take the paintings. I will try not to. I'll try to leave them behind. It's very tempting, though. Thank you, Mark. Enjoy your visit. Wasn't that interesting? And if this has tickled your appetite, make sure you don't miss this new exhibition, AIR-S, Sergeant's American Portraits, that tell you what, you just need to come to Kenwood anyway. It's so beautiful here. To find out more, visit the website of English Heritage.