An elderly resident of Keighley's Herncliffe nursing home was this week reunited with a portrait of herself painted 81 years ago by the former owner of Cliffe Castle.

On Wednesday Lady Rozelle Raynes, whose family owned Cliffe Castle until 1959, presented Herncliffe resident Gertrude Woolard, 91, with a portrait painted by Mrs Raynes's mother, the late Countess Manvers, in 1918.

Lady Rozelle, nee Fredrica Rozelle Ridgeway, is the great-grand-daughter of Sir Isaac Butterfield, who in 1878 renovated Cliffe Hall and christened it Cliffe Castle.

As a young woman her mother, Marie-Louise Roosevelt Butterfield, lived at Cliffe Castle with her parents Sir Frederick Butterfield and Jessie Kennedy Ridgeway.

At the time head gardener George Sadler lived there with his family, including his young daughter Gertrude Woolard, at Tower House.

In 1918, the 29-year-old Marie-Louise Butterfield, who married Capt Gervas Evelyn Pierrepont, and later became Countess Manvers when her husband succeeded to the Thoresby Hall estate, in Nottinghamshire, asked George Sadler if his daughter would sit for a portrait. Gertrude obliged and the housekeeper at that time, a Miss Donald, told Gertrude she would get a photograph of the life-size pastel portrait.

Gertrude never received the photo and only briefly saw the picture before it was hung in the dining room of the Butterfield's Curzon Street home, in London.

When Mrs Woolard's story was featured in Herncliffe's magazine, Journal, Lady Rozelle, who succeeded to Thoresby Hall after her mother's death in 1984, asked the picture librarian at the hall to search for the portrait.

The late Countess Manvers had amassed over 500 paintings at Thoresby, but the portrait of Mrs Woolard was traced within a couple of days and Lady Rozelle contacted Herncliffe to tell them of her intention to return it to Mrs Woolard.

Having photographed and reframed the picture, Lady Rozelle, who was born at Cliffe Castle in 1925, came to the Spring Gardens Lane nursing home on Wednesday to present the portrait to Mrs Woolard.

Before seeing the portrait, Mrs Woolard said: "I have often wondered whether it was stacked away in some lumber room. I would have been about nine when I sat for that portrait."

"I was impressed with the portrait and it gave me a lifelong interest in art."

After being presented with the painting, Mrs Woolard said: "It is something I never expected, really. I did see the picture when it was finished but I never saw it again."

Mrs Woolard says the picture took six sittings took complete. She says: "I must have been a quiet child to sit still all that time, although we did what we were told in those days."

She says it is planned to hang the painting in Herncliffe, but expects it to return to Cliffe Castle one day.

Lady Rozelle, who Mrs Woolard believes looks very much like her mother, says the painting was retrieved by Janet McFerran, one of the art curators at Thoresby Hall, in a storeroom where many of Countess Manvers' paintings were stored.

She says: "Janet took the picture into a specialist's and framed it and had the pastel looked at so it did not fall apart."

After Lady Rozelle's visit to Herncliffe she, her husband and a number of the painting and furnishing staff from Thoresby Hall who accompanied her to Keighley, returned to the ancestral home of Cliffe Castle for a tour of the family rooms.

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