(Emma Judith) Mary Forster (1853–1885) was a British water-colour painter.

Life

Forster was born on 6 December 1853. She was the daughter of Thomas Barton Watkin Forster and Emma Stewart (born Galbraith), a landscape-painter, of Holt Manor, Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire. Her father was an amateur painter who had exhibited since 1859[1] and he and his daughter would go on sketching trips to locations that included France and Wales. Forster exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1876, 1878 and 1880.[2]

In 1884 she became an associate of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours. On 3 June 1884 she married Samuel Hill Smith Lofthouse who was a barrister who went on to be an honorary secretary to the Bar Committee and an assistant recorder.[3] She only briefly exhibited under her married name as she died on 2 May 1885 in Lower Halliford on the Thames during childbirth. Her brief career was marked by an exhibition of 26 of her works later that summer[1] and a brief obituary in the Dictionary of National Biography.[4]

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