Description
Vanity Fair Print Alexander Nelson Hood
Published: 26th October 1905. Original Vanity Fair Print with the caption: The Princess’s Private Secretary
He served as Controller of the Household and Equerry to Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge between 1892 and 1897 and was an Extra Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chambers to Queen Victoria from 1892 to 1901. He was Private Secretary to Mary of Teck as Princess of Wales from 1901 to 1910, and was then her Treasurer as Queen between 1910 and 1919. He was invested as a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. British courtier and Sicilian nobleman. “Discreetly homosexual” and described by his Sicilian biographer as “intelligent and refined”, he was well-respected and liked by the Brontese, and spent six months of each year resident at Maniace until his old age. He was, like many contemporaries in his pre-World War II aristocratic circle, a “great admirer of Mussolini and the Fascist regime “He died unmarried on 1 June 1937 at La Falconara in Taormina, Sicily, aged 82 and was initially buried in the garden of the villa, next to his sister Rosa Penelope Hood (1852–1922). Prior to the sale of the villa in 1948, both bodies were removed and reburied together in a single grave (with gravestone and monumental cross inscribed “Peace” also brought from Taormina) in the private Hood Cemetery at Maniace, in 2020 the last remaining possession of the Hood family in Sicily.
Dimensions approximately 23cm x 35cm. Overseas buyers, please do not buy without contacting us to agree shipping costs.Signed by: SPY, Leslie Ward
This print has been lightly trimmed. Will mount and frame. Comes with original biographical sheet.
