Mary Frances Dowdall
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![Black and white drawing of multiple characters gathered around a anxious-looking woman seated at a table.](#/media/File:Frontispiece_for_"Martha"_by_Mary_Frances_Dowdall,_by_Augustus_John.png)
Mary Frances was the youngest of five children of Cunninghame Borthwick, a stockbroker and the 19th Lord Borthwick, (1813–1885), and his wife, Harriet Alice (née Day), from Rochester, Kent, who died in 1917. She was privately educated. The family lived in Mayfair but from 1870 also owned Ravenstone Castle at Glasserton, Wigtownshire, now Dumfries and Galloway, in Scotland. In 1897 Mary Frances married Judge Harold Chaloner Dowdall, KC (1868–1955). They had four children.[2][3]
Judge Harold Dowdall was the subject of a 1909 painting by Augustus John, made at the end of his term as Lord Mayor of Liverpool.[4] One account of the painting contains incidental information on the work and on the Dowdalls.[5] Mary Frances Dowdall herself had her portrait painted in oils by the British lithographer and painter, Charles Hazelwood Shannon, whose surviving papers include correspondence with Harold Chaloner Dowdall and his mother and wife about the arrangements for portrait sittings and exhibitions of their portraits.[6]
