Cheshire Antiques Consultant Ltd has dated this Georgian Female Portrait Painting to the Georgian era.
Title “Portrait Of Lady Sara Losh Architect & Designer” C1815 19th Century.
Subject portrait of beautiful Lady Sara Losh shown in half length front profile view, she is gazing away from the viewer looking towards the left, wearing her traditionalwhite dress with a maroon shawl covering part of her right arm, resting her elbow on a shelf . She has rosy cheeks, fine blue eyes & long shoulder length brunette fashionably coiffed brunette curled hair. She has a cameo brooch tied to her dress sleeve.
Unsigned English school artist.
Circa early 19th century.
Medium oil on canvas.
Set in the original decorative gilt wood frame which enhances this artwork further.
Frame is an majestic display size being 72 cm wide and 86 cm high.
With hanging thread on the back ready for immediate home display.
By repute believed to be Sara or Sarah Losh (1785 – 29 March 1853) she was an English architect and designer. Her biographer describes her as an antiquarian, architect and visionary. She was a landowner of Wreay, Cumberland (now Cumbria), where her prime work, St Mary's Church, can be found. It anticipates the Arts and Crafts Movement and belongs to a group with buildings and monuments which Losh constructed.
Losh's papers were destroyed and none of her journals or drawings survive, but her life is described in Henry Lonsdale's The Worthies of Cumberland, published by Routledge in six volumes in 1867–1875.
She was born at Woodside in Wreay, near Carlisle, at an unknown date probably in late 1785, as she was baptised on 6 January 1786. She was the eldest of four children of John Losh (1756–1814) and his wife Isabella (née Bonner). Her father owned land in Woodside and was a partner with his brother William Losh in an alkali factory at Walker on Tyneside, part of Losh, Wilson and Bell.
One of her brothers died young and another had mental disabilities, so that Sara and her sister Katherine became joint heirs of their father's estate. Neither married and Sara inherited Katherine's share on her death in 1835. Her uncle, James Losh, was a barrister in Newcastle, a prominent member of the city's Literary and Philosophical Society, and friends with the poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey.
Lonsdale calls Losh was well read and educated. She had been to schools in Wreay, London and Bath, and travelled in France, Italy and Germany in 1814 and 1817. She spoke fluent French and Italian and could translate Latin with ease. Lonsdale compared her mind to that of George Eliot. Although she never married, she may have been romantically attached to a schoolfriend, Major Thain, who was killed at the Khyber Pass in 1842. Sara Losh died at Woodside on 29 March 1853 and was buried in the churchyard of Wreay, where she shares a grave with her sister Katherine.
Losh designed, funded and built several projects in and around Wreay from the late 1820s onwards. An example is a replica of Bewcastle Cross as a memorial to her parents, installed in 1835, and a schoolteacher's house at a villa in Pompeii. She also sunk wells and built village schools. By 1840, the old chapel at Wreay was in poor repair. Losh offered to grant the land and pay to replace it, provided she was given a free hand with its design. Permission was given by a faculty in May 1841.
No documentary evidence confirming the identification accompanies the painting and the association should therefore be regarded as a traditional attribution. The identification of the sitter is offered as a non-guaranteed professional opinion based upon evidence available and should not be regarded as definitive statement of fact. Nevertheless, the connection adds considerable cultural and historical interest to the work.
Cheshire Antiques Consultant Ltd has dated this Georgian Female Portrait Painting to the Georgian era.
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English Georgian Oil Painting Portrait Lady Sara Losh 1785-1853
