Sylvia Gosse RBA, RE, SWA, was a painter of street scenes, interiors and still-life figures in oils, and an engraver. She was the daughter of Sir Edmund Gosse, critic, poet, essayist and librarian of the House of Lords. He was a stern father, who, with his distinguished literary friends, invoked considerable shyness in his daughter. She was born in 1881 and educated at home and at Dinan in France where she was taught painting and drawing privately. On her return to London, she trained at St. John's School of Art and at the Royal Academy Schools. Her father was against her setting up as an artist in her own right but was probably persuaded by Sickert, an acquaintance of his, who met Sylvia in about 1908 and although she was often hard up, she made her own way financially from then on. In 1909 she showed at the Allied Artists Association and enrolled at Sickert's etching class at Rowlandson House in 1910. When Madeline Knox, who helped Sickert run the school, left to marry Arthur Clifton of the Carfax Gallery, Sylvia took over the teaching of beginners and the administration. She lived in a variety of flats in and around Fitzroy Street and Camden Town, including having a studio over Grimble's Vinegar Factory in Cumberland Market. She also had a cottage close to Sickert's house at Envermeu near Dieppe. As a woman she was prevented from joining the Camden Town Group, but was one of the first women members of the London Group in 1913, and also showed at the N.E.A.C. from 191 1 and the RA from 1912. She had a one-woman show at the Carfax Gallery in 1916. Sylvia Gosse is represented in many public collections, she was elected RBA in 1929 and RE in 1936 and SWA in 1934. Sylvia Gosse also collected paintings by her fellow artists. She donated to the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1913 Walter Bayes' The Open Door Harold Gilman's The Reaper, and Spencer Frederick Gore's The Windmill Ballet. In 1955 she donated to the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne Walter Sickert's The Poet and his Muse. Rather unsociable by nature, she preferred to mix with people outside artistic circles, although Orovida Pissarro, Lucien's daughter, and Arthur Clifton of the Carfax Gallery were close friends. After Sickert's second wife died in 1920, she looked after him in Dieppe and oversaw his return to England, and later in 1934, when he was in financial straights, she arranged the Sickert Fund which collected over £2,000 to keep him going. Her retirement, with increasing eye trouble was spent in Hastings. She died in 1968.