Explorer and big game hunter. Excellent photographer. Travelled in the then Belgian Congo in the 1930’s photographing a rare gorilla and accompanied Lord Moyne on his travels to South Pacific in 1930’s collecting live animals for the London Zoo and ethnograpghical material for the British Museum, the subject of his book “Walkabout”.38 Until 2000 held the record for the largest fish ever caught in British waters.

From Historical Portraits Image Library:

“The remarkable history of Vera Boscawen Lady Broughton ensures her reputation as one of the more extraordinary pioneers of exploration and anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century. She is known as an explorer, as a big game hunter, as a fisherman and as a highly regarded natural and anthropological photographer.

Vera Edyth younger daughter of Boscawen Trevor Griffith-Boscawen of Trevalyn Hall, Rossett, Denbighshire, was born on the 2nd of January, 1894. In 1913, she married (as his 1st wife) Sir Jock (Henry John) Delves Broughton, 11th Bt.. He succeeded his father to the title in 1914. Their marriage was dissolved in 1940. There were two children of the marriage: Evelyn Delves, born in 1915 and Rosamund, born in 1917. The sitter was a remarkable character. She was an insatiable explorer and game hunter. She wrote Walkabout with Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne, with whom she travelled a great deal. Walkabout was based in a six month trip which took them to Burma, Malaysia, Sarawak, Vietnam, the Philippines, China, Papua New Guinea and Australia, covering some 30,000 miles. The publication was illustrated with her photographs. Until the year 2000, she held the record for the largest tuna ever caught, off Scarborough, in Yorkshire. Her fish weighed some 700 lbs. Her considerable collection of Pigmy furniture, accumulated during her travels among the pygmies of Polynesia, was donated to the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford. She was also considered one of the best-dressed women of her time. Lady Broughton never remarried, and died in 1968.

The portraiture of Philip de Laszlo is - as much as that of John Singer Sargent to the previous generation - utterly redolent of the time that it depicts. It is a signal achievement of any portrait painter to give the impression of being so utterly in sympathy with the spirit of his time that his work is the principal means through which we perceive it. In other words, it is impossible to separate the degree in which de Laszlo merely recorded Society in the first three decades of the twentieth century from that in which he actively embellished and interpreted according to the canons that both he and his sitters followed. “