Suffering from anorexia nervosa, Dorothy died in 1911 aged 23, and it was her death that spurred Hazel to leave America.

[5] Hazel Martyn first met John Lavery, a Catholic-born painter, originally from Belfast whilst engaged to Trudeau.

[8] The Laverys lent their palatial house at 5 Cromwell Place in South Kensington to the Irish delegation led by Michael Collins during negotiations for the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921.

Hazel Lavery died of a heart attack on 1 January 1935 at her home in London, having been suffering ill health for over a year after an operation to remove a wisdom tooth, with her husband and daughter at her side.

[1][7] With the outbreak of the Second World War, Sir John Lavery moved to live with his stepdaughter Alice McEnery, at Rosenarra, Kilmoganny, Co. Kilkenny, Ireland and died there in January 1941.

Such a personification harks back to figures in ancient Irish mythology and has been exemplified in recent centuries by women such as James Clarence Mangan's Dark Rosaleen and W. B. Yeats' Cathleen Ní Houlihan.

Hazel, profiled by what photographers call a hair light, wears a wispy dress the colour of faded hydrangeas".

[7] Lady Lavery knew many famous figures of her era and corresponded with such notable figures as Maurice Baring, Hilaire Belloc, Owen Buckmaster, Tim Healy, Shane Leslie, Reginald McKenna, Jessie Louisa Rickard, George Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson and W. B. Yeats.

[14] According to the memoirs of Derek Patmore, a writer, artist, and interior designer who was a close friend of Lady Lavery's, Collins was "the great love in her life" and that Sir Shane "told me that when Michael Collins was killed in an ambush they found a miniature of Hazel hanging around his neck with a poem Shane Leslie had written to her on the back of it".