This beautiful early 20th-century watercolour by British artist Florence Katherine Mayer (1882-c.1937) depicts a young society lady carrying a straw hat.With head partially turned, she looks across the decades with eyes that simmer with a rich narrative. Her story is a mystery but her expression suggests either betrayal or melancholy. Produced in 1915, it’s a year after the start of World War I. Has she lost a partner to the battlefield? Mourning in a black dress, symbolically wrapped in a patriotic sash of red, white and blue?In 1915, the high society frivolities of the Edwardian period seemed a far cry from the realities of war. When so many families were separated and lives began to unravel following news from the front. Florence Katherine Mayer knew it well, born into an affluent family, her patrons often had military connections.A few years earlier, the census of 1911 records her as staying at Carlton Curlieu Manor in Leicestershire with Annie Liddell Best, a lady of m...