On this day 100 years ago, the future Queen Elizabeth celebrated her 23rd birthday

What she told her diary as she sat for her first portrait after marrying Bertie, the man who would become King George VI

The Duchess of York at age 23, painted by Savely Sorine

The Duchess of York looks pensive, which is puzzling because it was August 4th, 1923, her 23rd birthday, and she had been happily married for three months to the Duke of York, the future King George VI. The reason, as she wrote in her diary: She was thinking of the wedding of a former suitor.

Her expression was captured by the Russian artist Savely Sorine while she sat for her first portrait as a member of the British royal family. Popular for his paintings of women in the British aristocracy and prominent Europeans, Sorine was known for eliciting aspects of character and personality in his portraits.  

Elizabeth was being painted in the royal couple’s home at White Lodge in Richmond Park on the edge of London. “Whiters,” her nickname for the eighteenth-century Palladian villa, had been a wedding gift from Bertie’s father, King George V, at the suggestion of his mother, Queen Mary, who had grown up there. Bertie’s older brother, Prince Edward, the future King Edward VIII, had been born in the room where Queen Mary had lived from age three until her marriage.  The house was elegant but impractical. Bertie and Elizabeth had already begun to find its running costs burdensome and its location inconvenient.

The entrance to White Lodge in 1923

Bertie and Elizabeth had settled into White Lodge in early June after an extended honeymoon in England and Scotland. Elizabeth was still recuperating from the whooping cough that a doctor had diagnosed at the end of May. As described in Elizabeth’s diary that I read in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, their first summer together had been mostly spent socializing with friends and family. Elizabeth had a minimal schedule of royal duties. Bertie interspersed official engagements with polo and lawn tennis on the court at White Lodge.

The rear view of White Lodge in 1923

Among the friends the Yorks entertained that summer were Bertie’s former equerry, James Stuart, and his fiancée, Lady Rachel Cavendish, a daughter of the prestigious and wealthy Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. Before Elizabeth met Bertie, she and James had been romantically involved. After Bertie fell in love with Elizabeth in the summer of 1920, he and James were rivals for her affection. It was no coincidence that at the end of 1921, a loyal friend of Queen Mary offered James Stuart—the Earl of Moray’s impecunious second son—a lucrative job in the United States, which cleared the courtship field for Bertie.