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LADYSYBILCHOLMONDELEY:^ COURTESYOF^HOUGHTONHALL;TWOGIRLSINWHITE^DRESSES:^ HISTORIC^COLLECTION/ALAMY;CHOLMONDELEY:^ JONATHANBECKER/CONTOUR^BYGETTYIMAGES.^ F
OR^DETAILS,^ SEERESOURCESAs a textile expert, she became fascinated with Sargent’s
famous shawl. Her quest to give the scarf new life—and
return it to her family—is a saga involving multiple gener-
ations of important families, including the Rothschilds and
Sassoons; one of the great historic homes in England, the
18th-century Houghton Hall in Norfolk; a leading American
art dealer, Warren Adelson; and the Museum of Modern
Art in New York City.
Housego’s family has remained closely connected to
their ancestor. Her brother, Richard Louis Ormond, an art
historian and former deputy director of the National Por-
trait Gallery, is a leading Sargent expert, authoring the art-
ist’s catalogue raisonné (nine volumes, over 3,100 pages,
including all of Sargent’s portraits and landscapes). “He
died long before I was born, so, sadly, I never knew him,”
Housego says of her great-uncle. “But elder members of my
family remember holidays with him in the Alps and how
he was always painting with his two sisters, Emily and my
grandmother, Violet, who was the mother of his muse, my
aunt Rose-Marie.”
In India, Housego devoted herself to creating busi-
nesses that support traditional handweaving methods.
She cofounded Kashmir Loom, a line of cashmere scarvesand throws made by the finest artisans in and around Sri-
nagar, the lake-filled region high in the mountains of Kash-
mir. As a maker of sumptuous textiles, it was only natural
that Housego would be inspired to conjure the wrap in her
great-uncle’s paintings. “It sparked the idea of re-creating
Sargent’s shawl in Kashmir,” she says of the project, which
has required more than a decade of dedication. Eventually,
she was able to weave eight replicas of the Sargent shawl.
Far from a superficial flourish, the scarf was an essential
element in Sargent’s work. “He used fashion and decor to
give an artistic and art-historical heritage to his work,” says
Erica Hirshler, interim chair of Art of the Americas at Bos-
ton’s Museum of Fine Arts, which has more than 60 works
by Sargent and an extensive archive.
On his annual summer holidays, Sargent traveled with
costumes and accessories that he would incorporate into
his paintings, says Stephanie Herdrich, assistant curator at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an expert on the art-
ist. “He always loved to dress those who posed for him and
excelled at representing the surfaces and textures of lus-
cious textiles,” she says. “The cashmere shawl was a favorite
from about 1907. It becomes a vehicle for Sargent’s explora-
tion of form, line, and pattern.”