‘She had no neutral gear’: Lindy Dufferin remembered

In 1957, when my dear godmother, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (1941-2020), was 16, she began her diary. The granddaughter of the Duke of Rutland and daughter of Loel Guinness, an MP, financier and Battle of Britain pilot, Lindy Dufferin had a gilded childhood. Her entries as a teen are like no other: ‘Randolph Churchill [Winston’s son] was staying the night here… It was most embarrassing because Randolph was very drunk…’ In October 1957, she was in Paris: ‘The Dutchess [sic] of Windsor came… I did a show of Rock & Roll. It was all great fun. Bon Soir!’

But, amid all the luxury, a note of seriousness enters – there was art, too.

Clandeboye became a kernel of art, literature and music. Vikram Seth stayed. Robert Lowell gave a recital

That autumn, she went to stay with her mother in Coughton, Warwickshire. There the artist Paul Maze (1887-1979), an Anglo-French painter known as ‘the last of the post-impressionists’, came to stay. He did a drawing for teenage Lindy of his house in Twyford, which she stuck into her diary. It was the first of many great artists she and her husband, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, would collect over the years. So began Lindy’s unique life as art collector, artist, patron and entrepreneur.

Sheridan Dufferin set up the Kasmin Gallery with John Kasmin in New Bond Street, where they held the first David Hockney show in 1963. Hockney painted and drew Lindy and Sheridan several times. Hockney’s most famous painting, ‘A Bigger Splash’, hung in the Dufferins’ London house. ‘It had been bought by Sheridan when the film director Tony Richardson turned it down,’ Hockney tells me. ‘[Richardson] had had it delivered to his house on Egerton Crescent, kept it for a week and then decided he hated Hollywood. Lindy knew it wasn’t about Hollywood at all.