QUEEN MARY EXHIBITS AT ROYAL ACADEMY

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21280, 25 February 1939, Page 10

QUEEN MARY EXHIBITS AT ROYAL ACADEMY

LONDON, January 4. Queen Mary is opening the Scottish Art Exhibition at the Royal Academy to-morrow, and for the first time she also will be an exhibitor. She is showing a little stool in Queen Anne mahogany which she embroidered herself to go with the set of chairs worked by ladies of Scotland for Holyrood House. The seat is worked in a petit point design in cream, rose, and fawn.

The Queen’s mother and two sisters worked the two Holyrood House chairs which are being shown. The late Countess of Strathmore and Lady Rose Leveson-Gower embroidered one, and the other was done by Lady Elphinstone and the Hon. Jean Bruce. At this exhibition will also be shown a portrait of the eighteenth century woman who inspired the phrase “blue stocking.” She was Mrs Elizabeth Montague, wellkonwn authoress and leader of the London society of her day. Her evening “conversation parties,” where all the intellectuals gathered together, gave rise to the term. The women guests wore blue stockings as a sign of distinction, in imitation of a fashionable French visitor, Mme. le Polignac. Mrs Montague, however, does not in the least resemble the accepted idea of a “blue stocking.” Her portrait, painted by Alan Ramsay, Court painter to George 111, depicts her as a beautiful young woman in an attractive pink dress, with a pink carnation tucked into the bodice. Topical “Say,” said the woman customer over the telephone, “the next time I order chicken, don’t send me any more aeroplane fowls.” “What do you mean—aeroplane fowls?” asked the butcher. “You know what I mean —all wings and machinery and no body.”