Norah Mary Madeleine Bourke (26 April 1873 – 20 June 1948) was a socialite garden designer who between the World wars became a major influence on garden design and planting in the United Kingdom and on the Continent. In 1895, a year after this drawing was made, she married the artist’s brother, Sir Harry Lindsay and went to live at her wedding gift, Sutton Courtenay Manor, Oxfordshire, actually an assemblage of charming and picturesque houses and cottages, fine barns and stables, where she developed her skills as a gardener.

'Her wit was extravagant, her conversation an ecstasy, her garden the finest in England, her appearance exotic to a degree,' wrote the diarist Chips Channon. 'She had Renaissance hair, tight lips and treacherous eyes but was a fine friend, and a worshipper and begetter of beauty.'

Lady Diana Cooper, daughter of the artist, wrote about when she was 17: ‘The place of all others for romance and gathering rosebuds and making hay and jumping over the moon was Sutton Courtenay. This lovely sixteenth-century (sic) manor house belonged to my Uncle Harry Lindsay and Aunt Norah. There once a year I was allowed to go before I came out. The garden was famous for its imagination and fertility. Flowers literally overflowed everything and drifted off into a wilderness. The house was furnished impeccably 'of the date' and lit by acetylene gas that simulated candles to perfection. We ate under a loggia from great bowls of chicken in rice and kedgeree and mushrooms and raspberries and Devonshire cream and gooseberry fool and figs – all in abundance. I would arrive carrying a letter from my mother entrusting me to Aunt Norah’s great care – not too late to bed and above all not to be alone with young men. The chief object of the visit, as I knew and as Aunt Norah knew, was to drift in a boat all day long with one of the Oxford heroes through the reeds and inlets of the Thames which flowed by the garden – a dinghy full of poetry books and sweets and parasols and bathing dresses – and better still (or worse!) in the moonlight with the best loved. So the letter was ignored by my aunt, who was younger much than my mother and did not mind anyway if I came to no good. I loved her very dearly and miss her today. She dressed mostly in tinsel and leopard skins and baroque pearls and emeralds, and her exquisite hands could play the piano with skill and feeling.’

Watts painted Norah in the same year. There is a lithograph after a drawing by Manners of Norah in the NPG dated 1897, and another of her younger sister Madeline in 1886 when she was 7.