Cathleen Sabine Mann

Cathleen Sabine Mann (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1896 – London, 1959) was a British portrait painter who also worked as a costume designer for film. The daughter of the Scottish portraitist Harrington Mann, she took lessons from her father and from the painter Ethel Walker, who continued to tutor her while she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. She became a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, showed regularly at the Royal Academy from 1930, and two of her 1952 portraits, of Sir Matthew Smith and Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, are held by the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Her painting was interrupted by the First World War, when she served with an ambulance unit. In the 1930s she designed costumes for British films including The Iron Duke (1935) and Things to Come (1937). During the Second World War she worked as an official war artist, painting portraits of officers such as Adrian Carton de Wiart and Allied commanders. These works were reproduced in magazines such as Time and shown in London before touring America.

From her marriage to Francis Douglas, 11th Marquess of Queensberry, in 1926 until their divorce in 1946 she was known as the Marchioness of Queensberry, a title that drew the label "painting peeress", which she disliked. She then married John Robert Follett. The deaths of Follett and her former husband in 1953 coincided with a period of personal crisis, yet it is said that she produced some of her finest work in her last years, including landscapes, child portraits, sculpture and abstract painting. She died in 1959 in her Brompton studio from an overdose of sleeping pills.