Born Laura Sylvia Gosse, the daughter of Sir Edward Gosse, eminent novelist and critic, she was an English painter and print-maker, best known for her street scenes and interiors. She studied at the St John’s Wood School of Art, the Royal Academy Schools and the Westminster Technical Institute in 1908 as a student of Walter Sickert’s etching classes. Sickert much influenced her art and she became his loyal disciple, teaching with him at his Rowlandson House School. She exhibited at the Allied Artists Association from 1909, the New English Art Club 1911, Royal Academy from 1912, the Camden Town Group exhibition in Brighton in 1913 and with the London Group in 1914 as a founder member. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Carfax Gallery in 1916. From 1920 she lived at Envermeu near Dieppe – both towns the subject of numerous works - where she tended Sickert’s wife Christine during her terminal illness and nursed Sickert back to health and sanity after Christine’s death. In 1934 she instigated a fund to support him in his old age. Her work is represented in the collections of the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum and numerous provincial art galleries in England.

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