Further googling disclosed that de Candolle’s American wife had been well known as the socialite wife of Sir George Barclay 1862-1921, a British career diplomat and member of the British banking family. Described in Bieler’s book as ravishing, cigar-smoking and the life of the party, Lady Barclay divorced her husband of nearly thirty years in 1919 to marry de Condolle in May, 1920. Such a scandal in society was recorded in the daily newspapers. Beatrix’s only child Dorothy had married Sir Coleridge Kennard in 1911 at Beatrix’s urging but they were divorced in 1918.
Beatrix Mary Jay Chapman 1864-1942 was a member of a prominent American family, including the essayist John Jay Chapman, her brother. Indeed, her correspondence with him, preserved in the Houghton Library at Boston, described her escape from their apartment at the Point near the train station in Smyrna to the island of Malta. Her husband remained in Smyrna to protect the British ownership of the railway.
I discovered that in the following year Beatrix donated her collection of antiquities from Smyrna, which she showed Gilbert, to the Museum of Art in Geneva, where her husband’s family was well established. The collection consists of a thousand objects, mostly fragmentary terracotta figurines, removed without any recorded context from nearby archaeological sites. They have been studied by Dr. Chantal Courtois for her 2006 doctoral thesis, which unfortunately remains unpublished: “Essai d’identification de la coroplathie smyrniote dans la collection De Candolle du Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève” for the Université Charles de Gaulle at Lille.
Beatrix later wrote several books and “actively promoted her ancient pottery collection.” (Bieler, p. 185) There are photographs of Raymond de Candolle, his wife and her first husband in Bieler’s well- illustrated book.