Olga de Meyer

Olga, the Baroness de Meyer (8 August 1871 – 6 January 1931) was a British-born artists' model, socialite, patron of the arts, writer, and fashion figure of the early 20th century. She was best known as the wife of photographer Adolph de Meyer and was rumoured to be the natural or god-daughter of King Edward VII of the United Kingdom. After 1916 she preferred to be known as Mahrah de Meyer.

Of Portuguese, Italian, French, and American descent, she was born Donna Maria Beatrice Olga Alberta Caracciolo in London, England. Her father was Neapolitan nobleman Gennaro Caracciolo Pinelli, Duke Caracciolo (1849–?), eldest son of the 4th Duke of Castelluccio, while her mother was the former Marie Blanche Sampayo (1849–1890), a daughter of Antoine François Oscar Sampayo, a French diplomat who served as that country's minister to Portugal, and his American wife, Virginia Timberlake. Her great-grandmother Margaret O'Neill Eaton was the central figure in the Petticoat affair, a scandal that plagued President Andrew Jackson. Another great-grandparent was a Marshal of France, Count Auguste Regnaud de Saint-Jean d'Angély.

Olga was born at 14 William Street, Lowndes Square, Chelsea, on 8 August 1871 and her father registered the birth in Chelsea North-East Sub-District on 5 September 1871, 'Olga' being the third and 'Alberta' the fifth of her seven fornames. The 1871 Census, taken on 3 April 1871, showed the couple with her mother at Thomas's Hotel and Lord Carrington's diary shows them together at Marlborough House on 4 July 1871 when the Duchess was heavily pregnant and the Duke was unwell. Jane Ridley says that the Duchess 'scandalised London society that winter, going out shooting in a kilt and smoking cigarettes'.. Later gossip purveyed by Jacques Emile Blanche (who knew Olga and her mother at Dieppe in the 1880s) said that the couple had separated 'at the church door' and that Olga was the daughter or god-daughter of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, but Ridley considers it most unlikely that she was his child. As a Catholic Olga was certainly not the Prince's god-daughter. In the 1870s when staying at Sandringham 'an Italian Duchess, who is an Englishwoman, and her daughter, brought up as a Roman Catholic and now turning Protestant', presumably the Duchess and Olga, are mentioned by a visiting bishop. According to the writer Philippe Jullian the Prince believed that Olga was his child and supported her but others assumed that her mother's friend Stanislaus Augustus, 3rd Prince Poniatowski (1835-1908), a married former equerry of Napoleon III, was her father. Immediately after the death of her mother in 1891, Olga went to Naples and married in 1892, Prince Marino Brancaccio, a member of another Catholic family, but they were divorced at Hamburg in June 1899. When Olga married Adolph de Meyer the following month in London she did so in a Protestant ceremony.

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