AS KEEPER of Prints and Drawings at Windsor Castle from 1946 to 1969, Aydua Scott-Elliot helped a distinguished team of art historians to prepare the series of collection catalogues of the Windsor holdings which appeared in steady succession during the 1940, and 1950s. These included volumes on Domenichino and Canaletto (1948), Carracci (1952), Castiglione (1953), Bolognese (1955) and Roman (1960), none of which would have appeared without her enthusiastic help.
In particular she worked in close association with the great watercolour collector Paul Oppe on his book Sandby Drawings at Windsor Castle (1947) and on English Drawings at Windsor Castle (1950). Oppe described her assistance on the second book as amounting to collaboration, and as a result of their friendship she acquired a number of items from his own private collection, all of which she gave to the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester in 1999, in memory of Oppe, who died in 1957.
Aydua Helen Scott-Elliott’s mother was Princess Eydua, the daughter of Prince Erba Odescalchi of Szkico in Hungary, an ardent art historian. Aydua was educated at St Paul’s Girls School and St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and abroad. Before the war she worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and from 1941 she served as a temporary assistant civilian officer in the Admiralty. She remained there for five years, until she was appointed to her job at Windsor by the librarian, Owen Morshead, who had been in his post since 1926.
The royal collection of Old Master drawings contains an unparallelled 40,000 drawings and watercolours, and hundreds of thousands of prints. Acquisitions are still made, though no longer on the heroic scale of George III’s reign. Scott-Elliott ran the print room singlehandedly.
Windsor Castle has been opened to the public since the 16th century. One of Scott-Elliott’s responsibilities was to change the displays of drawings on the public route around the castle. She also helped with the first exhibition, Treasures from the Royal Collection, when the original Queen’s Gallery opened at Buckingham Palace in 1962.
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She had unique and beautiful handwriting, and she worked with Elspeth Yeo to research the Calligraphic Manuscripts of Esther Inglis, 1571-1624, a catalogue of which they published in the journal Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. Her innate artistic temperament also found its outlet in her own calligraphy woodcuts and in tapestry of beauty and extreme sensitivity.
Fortified by a robust sense of humour, she loved crosswords, and brought to Scrabble and croquet contests her own rules of engagement.
She was a commanding personage, and her distinctive authoritarian voice quelled dissension while her extensive vocabulary and choice of words were themselves to be savoured. She was kind, and tempered displays of her knowledge to her audience — but she demanded accuracy. On one occasion, having enjoyed a tour of Blickling Old Hall, a National Trust property, she was amused to hear her erudite guide declare that “the last child to be born at Blickling was Anne Boleyn”. Waiting until the visitors had dispersed, she congratulated the guide on her exposition before quietly announcing that the last child to be born at Blickling was in fact herself. Her mother had been staying there with her cousins, who had rented Blickling for Christmas.
Incapacitated by a stroke, she spent the last four years of her life at Holy Cross Priory, Cross in Hand, in East Sussex, cared for by the Benedictine Sisters of the Grace & Compassion Order.
She never married.
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Aydua Scott-Elliot, CVO, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, 1946-69, was born on December 11, 1909. She died on July 9, 2003, aged 93.