Item 06 - Letter, July 22 (?)

Rosamund Brunel Horsley Gotch was born on February 27, 1864, in Cranbrook, Kent, England.

She was a talented British costume designer, illustrator, and writer. Her father was the academic painter of genre and historical scenes, illustrator, and designer of the first Christmas card John Callcott Horsley (1817-1903), and her grandfather was musician William Horsley (1774-1858). She was the Head of the Costume Department at the Royal College of Music, designing clothes for operas performed between the wars. In 1937, Gotch published a biography of Maria Callcott, “Maria, Lady Callcott: the Creator of ‘Little Arthur’.” In 1938, she published “Mendelssohn and His Friends in Kensington Gardens: Letters from Fanny and Sophy Horsley, Written 1833-36,” a collection of her aunts’ letters describing the flirtatious composers’ visits to their family home in the 1830s.

In 1887, she married Dr. Francis Gotch (1853–1913), F.R.S., neurophysiologist and Professor of Physiology at University College Liverpool and Oxford University. She died on January 22, 1949, in Oxford, England.