Ingrid Roscoe

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Ingrid Roscoe, PhD (University of Leeds) is a writer on English art.

She was born at Rugby School on 27 May 1944. Her father, Dr Arthur Allen, a squadron-leader in the RAF, was in Devon, closely involved in plans for the forthcoming D-Day landings. Her future godfather, a house master at Rugby and a school friend of Arthur, provided a refuge for Ingrid's mother, Else. In the impulsive manner of the times, Else had come to England from Sweden in February 1940, to marry a man she had met only three times, boarding the last civilian ship to make it safely across the North Sea. Arthur Allen died during Ingrid's childhood and in 1958 her mother married a Yorkshire industrialist, Brigadier Kenneth Hargreaves (Lord-Lieutenant 1970-78) and the family moved to Wetherby, in Yorkshire.

Roscoe studied English for a year at the University of Nottingham, but abandoned her degree to marry a Yorkshireman, Marshall Roscoe, at the age of 19. The couple settled near Wetherby, and she started to become involved in voluntary activities as a young mother, first locally and then nationally, choosing principally to support arts-orientated causes. She began to publish articles on aspects of the fine and applied arts, and in 1980, with her children all settled at school, she enrolled in the Fine Art Department at the University of Leeds, where she took a BA in the Fine and Decorative Arts and then a PhD, on aspects of eighteenth-century sculpture in Britain. Her thesis on this research was on Peter Scheemakers, later adapted for publication by the Walpole Society.

She lectured at Leeds University through much of the 1990s whilst continuing to publish on British sculpture. She is editor of the revised Gunnis Dictionary of Sculpture in Britain, the pre-eminent reference on post-mediaeval British sculpture, with her co-editors Emma Hardy and Greg Sullivan, and is also the Lord Lieutenant of West Yorkshire.