Lady [Hannah] Lloyd Jones

Lady Hannah Benyon Lloyd Jones obe (d. 1982) was the third wife of Sir Charles Lloyd Jones, the chairman of David Jones Ltd from 1920 until his death in 1958. One of thirteen children, she married Lloyd Jones in Chicago in 1929. Returning to Sydney in the early 1930s, they moved to Rosemont, a colonial-era mansion in Woollahra, which subsequently became famous for the many receptions and other functions Hannah hosted there. Active on behalf of charities including the Royal Blind Society, Legacy and Barnardo’s and organisations such as the National Trust, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and St John’s Ambulance, Hannah was a leading member of Sydney society and known for her tastes in matters of fashion, interior decoration, fine art and gardening. She was awarded an OBE for her charity work in 1955. One profile of Hannah published three years before her death described her as an ‘extremely efficient, rich, powerful and strikingly handsome woman … who believes in contributing.’ Emil Otto Hoppé (1878–1972) is considered one of the twentieth century’s most influential portrait and documentary photographers. Munich-born and educated in Vienna and Paris, he became interested in photography while working for Deutsche Bank in London in the early 1900s. He established his own studio in 1907; co-founded the London Salon of Photography in 1910; and held his first solo exhibition in 1911. That year, he produced a series of portraits of the dancers of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Aiming to create portraits wherein ‘character rather than flattery [was] the dominant note’, he photographed such luminaries as Albert Einstein, HG Wells, Virginia Woolf and Rudyard Kipling, along with world leaders and royalty. His photographs appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair and Tatler and he published some twenty-eight books of his work. Commissioned to create a photographic portrait of Australia, he arrived in Sydney in 1930 and spent the next ten months travelling throughout the country. He published the results of his visit to Australia in The Fifth Continent (1931). The National Portrait Gallery, London, holds more than 150 of his photographs.

Purchased 2013