Mrs Hope Montagu Douglas Scott was the only daughter and eldest child of Henry Johnstone Younger of Harmeny , near Balerno. In 1918, she married Charles William Montagu Douglas Scott, a grandson of the 5th Duke of Buccleuch, Johnstone refers to their first meeting in his autobiography Points in Time, an autobiography (op cit) "That October day changed everything that I could have expected in the last years of my life...Her enthusiasm and sympathetic understanding re-kindled my passionate zeal to work".
Their freindship developed into a vigorous even flirtatious relationship during which time she collected a remarkable group of pictures, most of which relate to the artist's later work. Following her death in 1991 he bequethed to the University of Edinburgh and contains other version of this portrait which shows the curios emptyness, so typical of Johnstone's late portraiture.