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Lot Essay
Lady Louisa Augusta Greville was a keen amateur artist and talented printmaker. She primarily made engravings after landscapes by the Carracci, Salvator Rosa and Marco Ricci, as well as figure studies after Guercino, for which she was awarded prizes by the Society of Artists three years running (1758-60). She exhibited one etching publicly, a landscape after Rosa, at the Free Society in 1762. The majority of her oeuvre dates to these years, and no dated works after her marriage to William Churchill in 1770 are known (D. Gaze, ed., Dictionary of Women Artists, London and Chicago, 1997, I, pp. 62-63).
Born at Warwick Castle, Louisa was the eldest daughter of Francis Greville, then 8th Baron Brooke and later 1st Earl of Warwick, and his wife Elizabeth Hamilton. Printmaking had become a popular pastime for young aristocratic women (many of whom would have taken drawing lessons), no doubt encouraged by Angelica Kauffmann's growing success in the medium (Gaze, ibid).
Several sittings with Louisa Greville in 1758-59 are recorded in Reynolds's Pocket Books. The portrait appeared at auction in 1932 with its sitter unidentified, and by its next appearance at auction in 1969, she was wrongly called Mrs John Wilkes, née Mary Mead (1717-1784). This erroneous identification persisted until the publication of David Mannings' catalogue raisonné in 2000, in which he reported that the reverse of the original canvas bears an inscription correctly identifying the sitter and a date of 1759 (Mannings, loc. cit.).
Born at Warwick Castle, Louisa was the eldest daughter of Francis Greville, then 8th Baron Brooke and later 1st Earl of Warwick, and his wife Elizabeth Hamilton. Printmaking had become a popular pastime for young aristocratic women (many of whom would have taken drawing lessons), no doubt encouraged by Angelica Kauffmann's growing success in the medium (Gaze, ibid).
Several sittings with Louisa Greville in 1758-59 are recorded in Reynolds's Pocket Books. The portrait appeared at auction in 1932 with its sitter unidentified, and by its next appearance at auction in 1969, she was wrongly called Mrs John Wilkes, née Mary Mead (1717-1784). This erroneous identification persisted until the publication of David Mannings' catalogue raisonné in 2000, in which he reported that the reverse of the original canvas bears an inscription correctly identifying the sitter and a date of 1759 (Mannings, loc. cit.).