Vera was the elder 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. Vera 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.
Vera spent much of her life in Dorset. In the 1920s and 1930s, she lived at Studland Manor (currently ‘The Pig on the Beach’), bringing up her four sons whilst married to first husband George Mervyn Hamilton-Fletcher. Her second marriage to Major Dudley Ryder in 1938 saw the extended family living at Rempstone Hall, Corfe Castle.
This portrait shows Vera in her debutante phase in London, the year before she married her first husband. George Spencer Watson was a family friend, and both Vera and younger sister Rachel continued a lifelong friendship with his daughter, the sculptor Mary Spencer Watson, who lived close by in Purbeck, at Dunshay Manor, which her father had purchased in 1923. Vera was an energetic gardener, artist and writer. She was also passionate about music, which she had intended to pursue professionally as a concert pianist before marriage.
