Rachel was the younger daughter of Sir Herbert Frederick Cook (1868-1939), 3rd Bart and 3rd Viscount of Monserrate, and the Hon Mary Nelson Hood (1873-1943), daughter of the 2nd Viscount Bridport. Sir Herbert was an art historian, collector and a committed patron of the arts. Rachel had a privileged Edwardian upbringing in Surrey, with family holidays at their Dorset holiday home, Hill Close, in Studland - or at the Palace of Monserrate in Sintra, Portugal, which her great grandfather, Sir Francis Cook, 1st Bart, had bought and restored in the 1850s.
The present work was painted by Spencer Watson at Studland. The inclusion of the goat alludes to Rachel and her mother’s involvement in goat breeding during the First World War. Spencer Watson was a family friend who moved to nearby Dunshay Manor in 1923. Rachel and her sister remained lifelong friends with George’s daughter, the sculptor Mary Spencer Watson.
Rachel married Sir John Serocold Paget Mellor, 2nd Bart in 1922, and secondly, in 1939, Australian Captain William Eric Lloyd, who was killed in action during the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943. Rachel herself was active throughout the Second World War as a nurse for the British Red Cross and provided medical assistance and care to survivors from the liberation of Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp in April 1945.
