The eldest daughter of Francis, first Earl of Warwick, Louisa Augusta grew up during the period when her father was transforming Warwick Castle. Having spent five years in Italy on a Grand Tour, he had returned a great admirer of Italian art, and in the late 1740s commissioned Canaletto to paint a series of views of the castle and its surrounds, then being landscaped by Capability Brown.
Greville is believed to have studied under Joseph Goupy, who made watercolors and etchings of landscapes, and etchings of religious subjects. This seems to fit with her surviving work, which also dearly shows the effect of the Earl's taste. It is recorded that she made prints after works by Caracci and Rosa (showing a landscape after Rosa in 1762). A fine etching, ,4 View Taken from the Priory at Warwick (1757). one of ten of her works included in Richard Bull's Etchings and Engravings by the Nobility and Gentry of England (British Museum), was perhaps influenced by Canaletto, who had drawn the castle from the same vantage point.
Both the British Museum and the Tate have prints made by Greville after Guercino, who was admired as one of the finest Italian painters by the English aristocracy during the mid-eighteenth century. By the early 1760s George III owned a painting and a series of drawings by the artist, and to celebrate their acquisition Bartolozzi made etchings after these works. It would appear that Greville's British Museum etching is a copy after one of Bartolozzi's most ambitious prints, a 'long landscape' with figures crossing a bridge. The Tate etching is clearly inscribed 'Guercino delin.' and carries Greville's intertwined monogram LAG. It is bound in the same volume of prints. Etchings by Various Masters, as work by Mary Hartley and Amelia Long, Lady Farnborough. Greville was awarded gold medals by the Society of Arts in 1758 and 1759 for landscape drawing, and in 1760 for a figure subject after Guercino. |
