Marcia Amelia Mary, Countess of Yarborough,
née Lane-Fox (1863-1926),
as
Madame Choglokov

A relative of the Empress Elizabeth of Russia, Madame Choglokov (1724-1756) was appointed Grande Maîtresse with special responsibility for spying on the Grand Duchess Catherine (later Catherine the Great). She also fell under the spell of another courtier, Prince Piotr Ivanovitch, and the two of them carried on a secret love affair for years.

The future Catherine the Great wrote, upon Madame Choglokov’s appointment as her governess: “Had (the Empress and Grand Duke) known a more malicious creature, she would certainly not have received the post.”

For her character in the imposing Queen Catherine Quadrille, the Countess of Yarborough commissioned the couturier Mrs Ada (Adeline Cort) Nettleship (1856-1932) of Wigmore Street, London, to make an ivory-white satin gown, upon which the Russian double-headed eagle is embroidered with emeralds and gold. The emerald green train is of velvet lined with gold and edged with sable. The countess wears a high collar of gold lace embroidered with emeralds and diamonds, with ostrich feathers and a diamond and emerald aigrette in her hair rather than the expected kokoshnik which would have been de rigeur for the Russian empress’s maids-of-honour. The costume was stated to have been “copied from an old picture.”

The costumes worn to the coronation of Nicholas II and Alexandra in Moscow the previous year had been much illustrated in the press and Mrs Nettleship, aided by her workforce of more than thirty, succeeded in capturing something of the extreme sumptuousness of Russian court costume. Wife of the well-known animal painter, John Trivett Nettleship (1841-1902),  Mrs. Nettleship was known for the extreme intricacy of her costumes, and indeed it was reported in the Boston Evening Transcript at the beginning of 1897 that she only took up dressmaking in order to prevent the exquisite embroidery she executed for the daughter of William Morris from being ruined by a dressmaker. The Lady Macbeth costume she had helped to make for the actress Ellen Terry in 1888, and which shimmered with the iridescent wings of the jewel beetle, was immortalised in oils by John Singer Sargent the following year and led to her making Ellen Terry’s “official and unofficial” gowns.

The Countess of Yarborough’s costume gives some idea of the scene viewed the previous year by many visitors to Russia for the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II. The Crown Princess of Romania, in her diary, recalled the overwhelming effect of the women in court dress which she described as “Byzantine in splendour, with all the mysterious gorgeousness of the East.”

All these images were made on the countess’s visit to the Lafayette studio, on 26 July, but it was the image (top) with the column which achieved a combination of pose, backdrop and props which the Countess found suitable for publication in the commemorative Album.