Miss Louisa Sim
(1842-1915)
10 May 1861

Volume 3, page 223, sitting number 3582.

The Silvy daybooks identify this sitter only as 'Miss Sims' [sic]. However, this was the lady's second visit to Silvy's studio, and the first sitting, which took place a month earlier on 12 April 1861, records her name as 'Miss Louisa Sim.' Moreover, the adjacent carte in the album is another portrait by Silvy, whom the daybooks identify as 'Mrs John Sim.'

This is therefore almost certainly Miss Louisa Sim, the daughter of John Coysgarne Sim, a 'Woodbroker,' and his first wife Harriet née Lambert. Her mother died in 1851 and her father remarried in 1854. At the time of the 1861 census, Louisa was living with her father and step-mother at Nonsuch Park House at Cuddrington in Surrey. Aged 19 at the time of the census, Louisa was born in London in or about 1842.

In 1870 Louisa Elizabeth Sim married William Hepburn Rennie (1829-1874), a British colonial official who had served in the Falkland Islands and Hong Kong. In 1871 he was transferred to the post of Lieutenant Governor of St Vincent in the Caribbean and presumably Louisa accompanied him. He died in 1874, aged only 45.

On 15 May 1883 Louisa married again, this time to John Rennie Cockerell (1830-1897), formerly of the Madras Civil Service. In 1891 the couple were lodging at a house in Brighton's Regency Square.

In 1911 Louisa, now a widow again, was living at 36 Westbourne Terrace in London with two unmarried daughters and six servants. She died there on 8 May 1915. According to the abstract of her will, she left an estate valued at £18,954.