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If you’ve visited the Billiards Room at Eastnor Castle, you might remember a portrait that used to hang there: a young woman standing on some black-and-white steps, looking demurely into the distance. That woman was Virginia Pattle – later Countess Somers – and she was far more than a decorative presence on our walls. Alongside her husband, the 3rd Earl Somers, who inherited the castle from his father in 1852, she helped shape the Eastnor you see today: the bold colours, the arabesque wallpapers, the eclectic mix of global objects collected from their travels. Eastnor’s creative spirit owes much to her. But her influence extends far beyond the castle walls. For the next few months, her portrait will be at the Watts Gallery near Guildford, as part of a new exhibition, The Pattle Sisters: Women of Influence (on until 4 May). Because before she was Countess Somers, Virginia was a Pattle: one of seven sisters – Adeline, Julia, Sara, Maria (“Mia”), Louisa, Virginia and Sophia – who were, as the exhibition shows, some of the most influential women in Victorian Britain. Watts Gallery in Guildford Their story reads like a film script. The sisters grew up in Calcutta (now Kolkata), daughters of an Anglo-Indian merchant and a French mother whose father was, rumour has it, exiled to India for flirting a little too enthusiastically with Marie Antoinette. Their childhood was a swirl of movement between India, London and Paris, a transient existence that created a sense of community that Mia’s granddaughter, Virginia Woolf, would later describe as a ‘fervour of hospitality’. When they eventually settled in London in the 1840s, they continued what they’d always done: gathering people. Their homes quickly filled with friends, acquaintances, artists and thinkers; evenings that stretched long into the night and, as family lore has it, included dishes inspired by their travels – including lobster curries, which became something of a signature. The sisters were soon the “it” girls of Victorian society, especially Virginia Pattle, whose beauty attracted so much attention that she once had to escape through a side door while shopping on Oxford Street because the crowds outside had grown unmanageable. She was also the object of many suitors’ affections. After one ball, Virginia racked up 16 marriage proposals, all declined on the basis that the men were dazzled by her looks rather than her mind. Writer William Thackeray was similarly besotted, writing in Punch: “When she comes into the room, it is like a beautiful air of Mozart breaking upon you.” (She didn’t say yes to him, either.) One person who did catch her attention was the painter G F Watts – although, unfortunately for Watts, this was more of a platonic affection. At the time, Watts was a kind of British Michelangelo. He was a Symbolist painter and contemporary of the Pre-Raphaelites, and by the 1880s, he would stage a New York exhibition that drew one million visitors – impressive, considering New York only had about 1.2 million people at the time. When Watts met Virginia in the 1840s, he became another moth to Virginia’s flame. He painted her portrait at Holland House – the first of many paintings of her, and the very same picture that later hung in the Billiards Room at Eastnor.
Eastnor Castle’s Imogen Hervey-Bathurst with Watts Gallery’s Assistant Curator Eleanor Stephenson But in painting her, he somewhat shot himself in the foot. Charles Somers-Cocks, the 3rd Earl Somers, saw the portrait and fell in love with the woman in it. And Virginia clearly saw some kind of kindred spirit in him, because this time she accepted his marriage proposal, and in 1850, became Countess Somers of Eastnor. Their wedding became the society event of the season. However, this is not a “girl meets boy”, “happily ever after”-type of story. This is a story of influence – and boundary-breaking women. The same year that Virginia was married, her older sister Sara and Sara’s husband Henry Prinsep took – on Watts’s recommendation – a lease on Little Holland House in Kensington. Watts, a close friend at this point, came to stay ‘for three days’ and ended up staying for 35 years, acting as an unofficial artist-in-residence. What emerged at the house was extraordinary: it became the Pattle sisters’ London base, and a crossroads for the great and the good of Victorian society. Sara, a natural hostess, began hosting Sunday salons, where thinkers, artists, politicians and scientists gathered for afternoons of spirited, liberal conversation. People came because the sisters were extraordinary, and Watts was exceptional; they stayed because the atmosphere was unlike anything else in Victorian London. Little Holland House was a world apart from the pipe smoke and hierarchy of gentlemen’s clubs elsewhere in the city. Its guest list was astonishingly varied – the Watts Gallery exhibition has 12 mounted photographs that show Charles Darwin, William Gladstone, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin and William Thackeray among the regulars. Critically, the sisters weren’t merely muses; they were catalysts. The creative energy of the house was theirs – an effect Thackeray called “Pattledom”. Watts filled the interiors with his work, including Renaissance-style frescoes and countless portraits of the sisters. One painting early in the exhibition, The Sisters (1852–53), shows Sara and Sophia not in corsets and crinolines, but in loose, richly coloured pashminas, draped almost like saris, with rakhi bracelets at their wrists. Their dress, anticipatory of the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements, spoke to a freedom of thought that was unusual in Victorian Britain.
The Sisters (1852–1853) by G F Watts Writer George du Maurier once noted a ‘slight element of looseness’ at Little Holland House, and he wasn’t wrong. The house was proto-Bohemian before Bohemianism had a name. The sisters spoke Hindustani to each other, served dishes from their childhood in India (including those legendary lobster curries), and created a world where class divisions mattered far less than conversation. Guests who would never otherwise have met, found themselves shoulder to shoulder, exchanging ideas that would ripple through the century – and would even inspire the Bloomsbury Group in the next. And this is where the thread returns to Eastnor. Because what we see in the story of the Pattle sisters – creativity, cosmopolitanism, a refusal to conform – is the beginning of Eastnor’s own character. Ours is a house shaped not only by earls and architects, but by spirited women like Countess Virginia Somers, whose global sensibilities helped inform the castle we know today. The bold colours, the arabesque wallpapers, the objects gathered from every corner of the world: these were all chosen by Virginia and the 3rd Earl, and echo that same colourful, boundary-crossing energy found at Little Holland House. Virginia’s portrait may be spending a season at the Watts Gallery, but her presence at Eastnor endures. Her influence isn’t confined to a frame; it lives in the rooms, objects and ideas that continue to define the castle. She is a reminder that Eastnor has always been a home for creative spirits – and remains so today.
The Pattle Sisters: Women of Influence runs until 4 May 2026 at Watts Gallery |
