Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

Her criticism of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement is revealing. She wrote: ‘It is
after all but painting, and the more wonderful it is the more it convinces one that the
utmost faculties of man are inadequate to portray or even conceive the things of a future
existence.’ 182 It was too literal. She preferred art, she wrote, that did not attempt to ‘fix
the clouds and embody the sunrise’ but instead created ‘analogous’ sentiments in the
mind, an art of symbols rather than of representation, an art closer to the primal
experiences of humanity. 183 Losh used an extraordinary number and variety of symbolic
forms, from the plan of the building itself to its external and internal furnishing and
decoration. All relate to the theme of death and resurrection reflecting both the heart of
the Christian faith and her own project, the memorialising of her sister, to whom she had
been especially attached and from whose early and unexpected death she seems never
entirely to have recovered.
Losh’s education left her well supplied with suitable, if non-Christian, motifs,
some quite conventional, such as the pomegranate which features in several places, and
the pine cone. The concept of images that awake ‘analogous sensations’ implies,
however, something more complex than the gracefully decorative classical allusions of a
well-stocked mind, something closer to what her uncle James’s friend Wordsworth, in the
Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, meant by:
A certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual
aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them,
truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature. 184
That is what is achieved at Wreay, where the familiar, in the form of a country parish
church is transformed by a personal metaphysic.
Losh certainly knew Wordsworth’s work and may have known him personally. 185
Moreover, although it is impossible to prove, it seems likely that she knew Richard Payne
182
Quoted in Londsdale, The Worthies of Cumbria, p.212.
183
Quoted in Londsdale, The Worthies of Cumbria, p.213.
184
Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads,1, p.vii.
185
Drew, ‘Sara Losh and the “chapel of ease”’, Appendix III, lists books from the family library, which
includes an early edition of the Lyrical Ballads as well as works by several important antiquaries.
87