Lady Louisa Hay

Lady Louisa Hay, by Sir Daniel MacNee PRSA (1806-1882)

Lady Louisa Jane Hay was the third daughter of George, 8th Marquis of Tweeddale. The Hay girls were considered exceptionally fertile, and all made good marriages. Louisa married Robert Balfour Wardlaw Ramsay in 1852, and the couple devoted the next couple of years to travelling around Italy. Robert was buying pictures; Louisa lost her first child, Anne, in Geneva. They went on to have 10 surviving children. Only one was a boy, and Louisa wrote to her mother about the celebrations in the mining village of Rosewell at the birth of baby George (Yester MS 1441(278).  The happy father threw a party for hundreds of workers, with roast meat to eat, a brass band and fireworks. Those were lavish years; the family lived in style and the household included a butler and a French lady’s maid. A photo shows Lady Louisa in her carriage, with two daughters and two grooms, setting out to visit the Crawfords in Balcarres, perhaps. She retained strong links with her large extended family, too.  However, after Robert’s bankruptcy, the family moved away to live economically in a sequence of rented houses in England, and around Europe.  They returned to  Whitehill after young Robert had left school. The girls were home schooled.

While Louisa can only be glimpsed in the Wardlaw Ramsay correspondance, the National Gallery holds two portrait photos of her, taken later on in life, which reveal something of her character.  She is smiling in the second one, shown here.  It’s a studio photo, and she is wearing a full skirted black taffeta dress with a high neckline. Her right hand holds a book (a Bible?) and she is fiddling with her jet necklace with her left.  Her brown hair is gathered loosely into a bun, and her head is bare. The contrast with the much earlier miniature, see left, by James Warren Child, is poignant.