Gwendoline Maud Syrie Barnardo
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Syrie Maugham (née Gwendoline Maud Syrie Barnardo, 10 July 1879 - 25 July 1955) was a leading British interior decorator of the 1920s and 1930s and best-known for popularizing rooms decorated entirely in shades of white.
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[edit] Birth
She was born in Hackney, England, a daughter of Thomas John Barnardo the founder of the Barnardo's charity for destitute children, and his wife, the former Sarah Louise "Syrie" Elmslie.
[edit] Career
In a career that lasted from 1922 until her death and which resulted in the establishment of fashionable shops in the United States and England, Maugham was particularly famous for designing white rooms, which were furnished in multiple shades of white in a variety of textures, all reflected in extravagant mirrored screens. The most well-known of these was the music room of her house at 213 King's Road in London. Her salon of her villa at Le Touquet, a society resort in France, was decorated entirely in shades of beige, relieved only by pale pink satin curtains. By the mid 1930s, however, she had largely given up the white decors that made her fortune and began to create interiors with baroque accessories and color schemes punctuated by bright green, shocking pink, and bold reds.
Her clients included Wallis Simpson, the Prince of Wales, the actress Marie Tempest, the Texas politician Oveta Culp Hobby, the Reader's Digest founder DeWitt Wallace, the couturier Capt. Edward Molyneux, the American socialite Mona Williams, and the British socialite and artist the Hon. Stephen Tennant.
[edit] Marriage to Henry Wellcome
In 1901, on a visit to Khartoum with her father, she met Henry Wellcome, an American-born British industrialist who had made his fortune in pharmaceuticals (his firm became Burroughs Wellcome). She was 22 and he was 48, and they married soon after. In 1903 they had a son, Henry Mounteney Wellcome, who apparently had a learning disability that kept him apart from his family for most of his childhood and youth.
The Wellcomes' marriage was not happy, and Syrie reportedly had numerous affairs, including with the department store magnate Harry Gordon Selfridge, Brig. Gen. Percy Desmond Fitzgerald, and the novelist William Somerset Maugham. Eventually, after some years of separation, she became pregnant with Maugham's only child, Mary Elizabeth, who was known as Liza.[1] When the child was born in Rome, Italy, she was given Wellcome's surname. Wellcome then publicly sued for divorce, naming Maugham as co-respondent.
[edit] Marriage to W. Somerset Maugham
Syrie Wellcome and W. Somerset Maugham married in 1917 in New Jersey, although he was a homosexual and would spent much of his marriage apart from his wife. They divorced in 1928. Her divorce settlement from Maugham was their house at 213 King's Road, fully furnished, a Rolls-Royce, and 2,400 pounds a year for her and 600 pounds a year for Liza.
In his 1962 memoir Looking Back Maugham virulently criticised his erstwhile wife, which caused a public outcry. After Maugham's death in 1965 Beverley Nichols, a former lover of Maugham's and a close friend of Syrie's, wrote in rebuttal a defence of her called A Case of Human Bondage (1966).
[edit] References
- ^ Her birth name is given as Mary Elizabeth Wellcome in the immigration and naturalization files of ellisisland.org, wherein she is listed, along with her mother, then Syrie Wellcome, on the 21 July 1916 manifest of the HMS Baltic.
[edit] Further reading
- The Scandal of Syrie Maugham. Gerald McKnight. ISBN 0-491-02761-3
