Histories

Sophia Orred, born 1814, Cheshire; married Archibald Dunbar 1840; died Duffus House, by Elgin, 2 June 1909. 

Sophia Dunbar was an accomplished amateur water colourist, exhibiting at the Royal Scottish Academy. She shared with her husband an interest in local antiquities and Continental travel. 

Sophia's father was George Orred Esquire of Tranmere Hall, near Birkenhead, Cheshire, and her mother was Elizabeth Woodville. Sophia was their youngest daughter and had two brothers and three sisters. It seems they were a close family as Sophia's relatives were frequent visitors to Duffus during her married life, and her brother George even took up residence at Grant Lodge, Elgin for a time. 

Sophia came to Moray as the second wife of Archibald Dunbar who in 1847 became the seventh Baronet of Northfield. (This Archibald, through his mother, Helen Gordon Cumming, was the nephew of Eliza Gordon Cumming, and cousin of Eka Gordon Cumming.) They married at St Oswald's Church, Chester in 1840, when Sophia was twenty-six and Archibald ten years older. A fine portrait by the Glasgow artist, John Graham-Gilbert, depicts Sophia in her wedding dress. The dress is said to be a copy of Queen Victoria's; she had married earlier that year. 

Home in Moray was Duffus House, built as a replacement for Duffus Castle. The House dates from the seventeenth century - with additions by William Robertson in 1835. It is situated in woodland on the southern outskirts of Duffus village, and stands very close to the boundary with Gordonstoun, a former home of the Gordon Cummings. Northfield (now Highfield) was the Dunbar town residence in Elgin until the mid-nineteenth century. 

Archibald's first wife, Keith Alicia Ramsay, died in 1836 and left four children: Archibald (known as 'Young Archie' until his seventies when he became eighth Baronet), Jeanie, Agnes and George. It seems their father was rarely at Duffus during his three and half years of widowhood. 

When nearly eighty, Agnes was asked by her niece, daughter of Jeanie, to put down anything she remembered of her childhood. The notes were transcribed by the niece in a beautifully legible hand (in marked contrast to Lady Sophia's scrawl) and are now a valuable family and social record. The children, especially Jeanie, aged twelve, had been anxious about the arrival of their new stepmother, but: 

she was nice and we liked her... I don't think in our lives we were ever jealous of each other, and so we failed to see that the absence of jealousy was a great virtue in our Stepmother. 

The children called Sophia 'Mama' and were in time joined by three stepbrothers: Randolph, Charles (ninth Baronet) and William. Sophia dreaded the birth of Willie in 1850. She went to Edinburgh to be under the care of Professor (later Sir) James Y Simpson, and took leave of the family as if she did not expect to return home. Agnes remembered: 

Her sisters were with her and for the first time she had a modern and thoroughly trained monthly nurse and had chloroform at the worst, and recovered wonderfully. 

Sir Archibald, his brother Edward Dunbar Dunbar of Sea Park, Kinloss, and their neighbour, Sir (Alexander) Penrose Gordon Cumming (eldest brother of Eka) were all keen antiquarians, as was her obstetrician. 

Professor James Y Simpson was President of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland from 1861, and was particularly interested in ancient carvings on stones, such as the Pictish carvings in the caves at Wemyss, Fife, and he and colleagues had been making enquiries for any in the coastal caves at Covesea, near Duffus. In Sophia's letter to Simpson of 22 May 1866 she says she was 'lately so fortunate as to discover some small remains of ancient sculptures in a cave at Covesea'. On the strength of her preliminary drawings, which recently resurfaced at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), John Stuart sent a Mr Gibb to make the drawings used in his second volume of Sculptured Stones of Scotland. The Sculptor's Cave, Covesea, thus became well known for its Pictish carvings, and this was the attraction for Sylvia Benton, who carried out the first formal excavation in 1928-30. From a couple of entries in The Elgin Courant in 1868, it seems that the Dunbars did some amateur digging at the Cave: a variety of finds, all now lost, including a human lower-jaw bone and part of a human skull, were donated by them to Elgin Museum. 

Sophia's letter to Simpson is primarily about a number of Bronze Age cist burials the Dunbars had excavated in the neighbourhood from Burghead to Covesea. She included a sketch of the most recent cist to be found, in which there was an urn - which the herd boy let fall, some of the neighbours removing the fragments as curiosities. As was common with nineteenth century antiquarians, they dug many cists, the contents of which have rarely survived. Two cists they reassembled at Duffus House, and several of Sophia's watercolour and ink sketches of local cists and jet necklaces are now in the archives of RCAHMS and Aberdeen Art Gallery. 

Sophia's artistic accomplishments merited a whole chapter in Ellen Clayton's English Female Artists (1876). Ellen, a feminist, wrote the book based on questionnaires sent out to the artists. A more recent appreciation appears in the catalogue of an exhibition of Sophia's work, From Elgin to the Alhambra, held at Aberdeen Art Gallery in 1987/88. She is said to have been fond of sketching from nature from early childhood. As a young woman, art as a profession, or even formal training in it, would not have been an option; her chief means of study would have been

looking at and copying the works of others and picking up hints from artists she happened to meet. 

The Dunbar family were in Jersey in 1844 for Sir Archibald's health, and Agnes attended school there. It may have been then that Lady Dunbar received lessons from John Le Capelain, a local marine and landscape artist. A self-taught artist, Le Capelain came to some prominence as a painter who captured the atmosphere of Jersey, from the mists of sunrise to the glowing colours of the setting sun. A painting of Burghead dated 1846 is one of several of her paintings that suggests Le Capelain's influence. 

While in Seville, Sophia made the acquaintance of two well-known artists, Edward Cooke, RA, FRS, FSA, FZS, FGS and John Phillip, RA. Cooke was not only a marine artist, but a polymath. According to Ellen Clayton 'Several rambles in search of the picturesque were enjoyed by her with Mr Cooke', as is attested by her paintings from this time. While in Barcelona, a reference to 'Prout-like houses' suggests she was familiar with the works and instructive art manuals written by Samuel Prout for such ladies as her. At the Alhambra she met a Russian artist, Monsieur Bachan, whom she considered a first-rate artist for his views of architectural subjects and costumes of the peasantry. 

A winter spent with easel and brushes in southern Europe is described by Sophia in her journal published by Blackwoods: Tour of a Family round the Coasts of Spain and Portugal during the winter of 1860-1861, with 'a wish to realise a few pounds for a charitable purpose'. They had previously spent a few winters at Nice, and the railway guides suggested Barcelona would be as easy. However, in the first of their travel traumas, they had to take a diligence from Perpignan, which overturned. Their inestimable, English-speaking, Spanish maid 'made a flying somerset over the mules'. 

Her account is full of details about hotels to avoid, the price of wines or a full suit of clothes for a matador, as well as detailed and often very personal observations on art, architecture and people encountered. They take in Gibraltar and cross the Straits, meet Moors and Jews and English Consuls, see a prisoner being flogged near to death in Tangier and visit a foundling hospital where the infants' eye complaints are treated with bleeding. One is left marvelling at the pace of the activity and experiences, at the belittling of the discomforts and uncertainties of the journeying, and at the resulting art work. 

Ellen Clayton records that it was after a series of bereavements in 1862 that Sophia took up painting seriously, finding solace in her art. This was the year in which her son, Randolph (20), and stepson, George (30) died. Sophia first exhibited, with the Society of Female Artists, Conduit Street, London in 1863. 

Her first painting exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy, in 1867, was a view of the Bay of Algiers. While in Algiers, Sophia made a friendship with Mme Barbara Bodichon, an artist of a very different background from herself. Barbara was the daughter of a Radical MP, Benjamin Leigh Smith and his young common-law wife, Anne Longden. A prime mover in campaigns to improve the rights of married women, Barbara was also active in the suffrage movement and instrumental in the founding of Girton College, Cambridge, owners of a number of Sophia's watercolours. 

In Duffus, Sophia's artistic interests were recognised in the planning of the new Duffus Church (architects A and W Reid). An article in the Elgin Courant in 1868 stated: 

Lady Dunbar of Duffus House, whose abilities as an artist are well known, has taken a great interest in the preparation of the plans of the church. The Heritors did well in allowing her highly-cultivated taste to guide them to a great extent in the character of the church... though they will no doubt involve considerably more expense than four square walls and a roof would have done. 

By the time she exhibited for the last time at the RSA in 1888, Sophia had shown forty-two paintings. She rarely gave titles to her works, other than the name of the place, and most of her paintings are watercolours of landscapes, with only occasional and incidental people. They were painted at home in Moray, pastoral scenes in the Laigh and on the coast, and in Aberdeenshire, and on frequent journeys abroad, especially to the Mediterranean. Apart from their considerable aesthetic merits, these pieces are records of places little visited by foreigners at the time, or in the case of her antiquarian sketches, the only record from a period when photography was in its infancy. These sketches are still regarded by archaeologists as valuable records of objects and locations. 

At the time of their Golden Wedding Anniversary in 1890, Sophia had been in very poor health, although the Baronet was 'hale and healthy'. She gave a short response to the address of thanks and praise given them by the tenantry, crofters and feuers but did not attend the celebratory bonfire with her husband. Elma Napier (née Gordon Cumming) recalled from about this time: 'everything in the drawing-room was old and queer and smelt of pot-pourri... In a wheeled chair, under a mob cap, sat Old Lady Dunbar, wife of Old Sir Archie'. She died nearly twenty years later in 1909, eleven years after her husband, aged ninety-five, and is buried in St Peter's Churchyard, Duffus. 

In 2008 the RCAHMS and the Scottish Portrait Gallery joined forces to present an exhibition entitled Faces and People. Lady Sophia, described as a skilled archaeological illustrator, was one of twenty individuals chosen as key figures who have contributed to Scotland's built heritage, in her case, by recording Scotland's past.