Lot Essay
This cottage was painted on more than one occasion and still stands today
Helen Allingham and her Circle
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We think of Helen Allingham as the supreme exponent of the rustic idyll in Victorian watercolour painting, evoking a never-never world of picturesque cottages deep in the Surrey countryside, hollyhocks at the window, girl and kitten at the gate. She appeals, in other words, to the heart rather than the head, and it is easy to forget that she moved in some of the highest artistic and intellectual circles of her day.
This was true even during her early years when she was making her reputation as an artist under her maiden name, Helen Paterson. Her numerous relations included Mrs Gaskell, the novelist, and the feminist, Bessie Parkes, while her aunt, Laura Herford, an artist who made history by becoming the first woman to enter the Royal Academy schools, was acquainted with the Pre-Raphaelites, sharing a house in London with the potter, William De Morgan. In 1866, encouraged by Laura, Helen herself moved to London from Birmingham to study at the Royal Female School of Art in Queen Square, Bloomsbury - where, incidentally, the William Morris firm had its premises at this date. Two years later she entered the R.A. schools. Her teachers included such leading artists as Millais, Leighton and Fred Walker, the last of whom greatly influenced her development. She remained at the R.A. until 1872, after which she continued to attend evening classes at the Slade School, founded the previous year under the directorship of Edward Poynter; Kate Greenaway was a fellow pupil and they kept in touch, although they were never close friends. Meanwhile, through the good offices of the animal painter Briton Riviere, she obtained an introduction to the engraver Joseph Swain, and found herself following in the footsteps of the great illustrators of the sixties. She began by making drawings for Once a Week and soon moved on to other periodicals, including the newly-founded Graphic. This greatly extended her horizons. Commissioned by the Graphic to draw 'first nights' at the theatre, she met the playwright and critic Tom Taylor and began to frequent his hospitable house in Clapham, one of the great meeting-places for mid-Victorian bohemia. Among those she encountered there were Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, who was almost her exact contemporary. Both remained lifelong friends and owned examples of her work. For the Graphic she also illustrated novels by Mrs Oliphant and Charles Reade, who told her he preferred her drawings to those of her collaborator, Luke Fildes. More work of this kind came her way when she entered the orbit of Leslie Stephen, editor of the Cornhill, and was commissioned to illustrate Miss Angel, a novel by his sister-in-law Annie Thackeray, and Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd. Hardy, whose vision of rural life was as artificial as her own, albeit a good deal grimmer, seems to have fallen in love with her and entertained hopes of marriage, later recalled in his poem 'The Opportunity (For H.P.)'. However in June 1874, not long after their meeting, Helen announced her engagement to William Allingham.
Born in 1824, Allingham was now fifty, twice the age of his fiancée. He had spent his early life as a customs officer, first at his native Ballyshannon in County Donegal and from 1863 at Lymington in Hampshire. But his real interest was literature, and in 1870 he had resigned his post to become sub-editor of Fraser's Magazine, graduating to editor four years later. Although his own talent was limited (witness his most famous poem 'The Fairies', beginning 'Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen'), he had a genius for friendship with greater literary figures and for recording his contacts with them in a brilliantly observed dairy. Helen was to edit this after his death and it was re-issued in 1985 with an introduction by Lord Norwich.
Their mutual involvement in the worlds of literature, theatre and art gave the couple many friends in common, but the marriage undoubtedly enlarged Helen's circle enormously. She never met William's old friend D.G. Rossetti, by now the confirmed recluse of Cheyne Walk, but those who sent wedding presents or goodwill messages included Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning and Burne-Jones. Carlyle, now a widower in his eighties, was one of Allingham's greatest heroes and was to dominate Helen's life for the next seven years. Even before her marriage she had been taken to Cheyne Row to be 'vetted', and the Allinghams' first home was nearby in Trafalgar (now Chelsea) Square to allow for almost daily visits. Helen was determined to paint the sage, and although Carlyle, who had no feeling for the visual arts, objected strongly, complaining that she made him 'look like an old fool', she persevered and eventually produced about a dozen watercolour portraits and many pencil sketches.
The Allinghams' move to Surrey in 1881, precipitated by Carlyle's death that February, did not entail a lessening of social contacts. On the contrary, the area was thick with celebrities, all of whom they knew. Tennyson, another of William's heroes, lived for part of the year at 'Aldworth', near Haselmere, while at Witley, George Eliot and G.H. Lewes had a country house, 'The Heights', and Birket Foster had been settled at 'The Hill' since the early sixties. Designed by Foster himself and full of works of art by his friends, notably Morris and Burne-Jones, the house was the centre of an artists colony which included Charles Keene, J.C.Hook, and the wood-engraver Edmund Evans. Another friend was Gertrude Jekyll, who lived with her mother at Munstead House near Godalming. Her garden provided Helen with many subjects, and they shared an interest in preserving the Surrey countryside and the cottages which featured so prominently in Helen's paintings.
Tennyson, too, was helpful in locating picturesque views. Though initially rather frosty to the new wife of his old admirer, and as disinclined as Carlyle to sit for his portrait, he soon warmed to Helen, commissioning her to paint Lady Tennyson and his favourite dog, and enjoying long walks with her over the downs, a pastime in which neither Lady Tennyson nor Allingham indulged. He gave the Allinghams a huge old-fashioned landau, apparently unaware that they kept no horses and were therefore unable to use it.
John Ruskin never really belonged to Helen's circle, but their names are closely linked. In his revived Academy Notes of 1875 Ruskin praised her Young Customers at the Old Water-Colour Society that summer, describing it as 'a thing which I believe Gainsborough would have given one of his own pictures for, - old-fashioned as red-tipped daisies are - and more precious than rubies'. They met the following year, and in 1879 Ruskin called on Helen in Chelsea. 'He greeted (her) with much empressement', Allingham noted in his diary, 'and sat for about half an hour looking at her drawings. He examined them through a pocket-microscope, (saying) "I am glad to see you paint sunshine"'. As time passed, they seem to have developed a respectful but wary relationship, Ruskin admiring her work but often finding points to criticise, Helen no doubt grateful for his interest but determined to go her own way. He included her, together with Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones, Leighton and others, among the artists discussed in the Art of England lectures which he gave as Slade Professor at Oxford in 1883; typically, however, he complained that she spent too much time on 'single heads, which are at best uninteresting miniatures, instead of fulfilling her true gift ... in representing the gesture, character, and humour of charming children in country landscapes'.
The Allinghams were still surrounded by friends when they returned to London in 1888. Hampstead was full of Helen's relations, as well as artists she knew like Briton Riviere and Kate Greenaway, who had been bracketed with her in Ruskin's Slade lecture. William's death the following year meant a more restricted life since so much of her time was devoted to work in order to support her children, but she continued to see much of the Tennysons, both at 'Aldworth' and their other house, 'Farringford', on the Isle of Wight. In April 1890, his old objections silenced, Tennyson sat to her for his portrait in his library at 'Farringford', not long before he sat for two last portraits by Watts. His health was shortly to fail. Helen, remarking that she hoped he would soon be better, received the cutting reply 'Aren't we both being rather hypocritical?', and he died in 1892, aged eighty-three. She continued to visit the family after his death, and in 1905 published a collection of watercolours under the title The Homes of Tennyson.
During her later years Helen made friends with a number of younger artists. She visited Robert Anning Bell at East Hagbourne in Berkshire, and must have known George Frampton, sculptor and close associate of Bell in the Arts and Crafts movement; she was to give paintings lessons to his son, Meredith, later well known for his 'surrealist' still-lifes and portraits. Another pupil was Vernon Ward, son of the Hampstead antique dealer who did her framing; he too became famous, as the bland originator of so many popular high-street reproductions. But the closest of her younger friends was W. Graham Robertson, artist, Blake-collector, and protean man of the stage. He and his mother bought the Allinghams' house at Sandhills in 1888, and Helen often stayed with him when she returned to the area to paint. In his autobiography Time Was (1931), he not only paid tribute to her 'lasting memorials of the fast-vanishing beauty of our countryside, ... visions of a lost Fairyland', but gave an affectionate picture of her character. 'Her quiet strength and serenity, her unfailing kindness, her quaint humorous outlook and shrewd judgment on men and matters, made her a delightful companion - whenever she found time to be companionable, which was not often. My memories of her wit and wisdom are chiefly in the shape of detached sentences, jerked over her shoulder as she sat at the bottom a damp ditch, knee-deep in nettles, or poised precariously on a pigstye wall, using her open umbrella as an easel'.
John Christian
Helen Allingham: A Short Biography
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Helen Allingham, née Paterson, was born on 26 September 1848 into a comfortable middle-class family in Swadlincote, Derbyshire. She remembered nothing of her birthplace because during her first year her father, a doctor, moved his wife and daughter to Altrincham, Cheshire, where he had purchased a new practice.
Surrounded by her mother's family, the cultured and liberal-minded Herfords, Helen spent a happy childhood as the eldest of seven children. The Herfords were convinced Unitarians, numbering amongst their friends and relations the novelist Mrs Gaskell and descendants of the scientist Joseph Priestly. Herford women had a reputation for being educated and artistic. Helen's grandmother, Sarah Smith Herford, achieved some renown as a painter before her marriage, and her artistic talents were inherited by her daughters and granddaughters. In 1860 Helen's aunt, Laura Herford, challenged the Royal Academy schools to admit women as students. Her subsequent victory, which made an enormous impression on the young Helen, gave women the chance of a professional art training for the first time.
Helen's carefree childhood came to an abrupt end when she was thirteen. A severe diphtheria epidemic in the Altrincham area killed both her father and three-year-old sister. Devastated by this double tragedy, Mrs Paterson took the remaining children to lodge with her husband's family in Birmingham.
Here Helen's artistic ability was recognised by the Paterson aunts, who arranged for her to take lessons at the Birmingham School of Design. Helen was an excellent student, winning many prizes, and she was soon advised to follow in her aunt's footsteps and pursue her studies at the Royal Academy schools in London.
This she did, being admitted in 1868, but the schools proved a disappointment; the teaching tended to be haphazard, much time was devoted to copying, and, as a woman, she was not allowed to draw from the nude model. By 1872 her attendance had dwindled and she was going to evening classes at the new Slade School, where she met Kate Greenaway. Meanwhile, to earn her living and assist her mother financially, she began to undertake commercial artwork while painting watercolours in her spare time. During the early 1870s the pen-and-ink designs of Helen Paterson were regularly seen in magazines like Once a Week and Little Folks, and she illustrated books as varied as the girls stories of Mrs Ewing and Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd. Soon after this she started work as both artist and reporter for the newly founded Graphic magazine. It says much for her ability and strength of character that she could persuade the editor to engage a woman. Helen was the only woman employed by the magazine, and indeed one of the very few women journalists in Victorian London.
During one of her regular visits to the theatre to sketch scenes from a new play for the Graphic, she met the poet and journalist William Allingham, reviewing the same play for Fraser's Magazine. Their marriage in 1874 surprised both friends and family, for, at fifty, William was twice his bride's age. Their marriage was a happy one, however, and enabled Helen to leave commercial art and concentrate on her watercolour painting. In 1874 she had two pictures accepted for the Royal Academy, and the following year she was elected an Associate of the Royal Watercolour Society. She was the first woman to be accorded this honour, and when women were admitted to full membership in 1890, she was again the pioneer.
Following their marriage, the Allinghams settled in Chelsea, near William's great friend the octogenarian philosopher Thomas Carlyle, whom she painted on several occasions. In Chelsea her son Gerald was born in 1875 and her daughter Eva in 1877. The family spent the summer either at the seaside or in the country, and the scenery Helen encountered on these excursions supplied the backgrounds for many of her paintings during the year. Figures were still the focus of her interest, but cottages and landscapes in Kent, Surrey and the Isle of Wight began to appear in her work.
After Carlyle's death in February 1881 the Allinghams left London for Surrey, where they had recently spent two enjoyable summers. The family settled in the small hamlet of Sandhills, just outside Haslemere, where Helen's third and favourite child, Henry, was born in 1882.
From the outset, Helen adored the area, and her art was transformed. She abandoned studio painting in favour of working out-of-doors, which she did all the year round in most weathers. Gradually the landscape gained precedence over the figures. Sunbonneted mothers and children still appeared in her pictures, but they became smaller as the thatched or red-tiled cottages Helen saw at every turn of the lane loomed larger. When she walked out of her front gate Helen faced the sandy hills [lot ] which gave the area its name. The cottages surrounding these sandhills were to be painted by her many times over from various angles [lots ].
During her Surrey period, Helen's output was prolific. Twice a year she exhibited at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours in London. Many pictures were cottage scenes but some depicted her own children in the nursery or the garden. So popular were her cottages that the Fine Art Society offered her a one-woman exhibition of 'Surrey Cottages' in 1886, followed by another entitled 'In the Country' in 1887. Both were sell-outs, with The Times declaring her work to be 'the very model of what an English water-colour should be'.
It was the poor health of her husband which persuaded Helen to return to London in 1888. The family settled in Hampstead, close to Helen's mother and sister and near her friend Kate Greenaway. William Allingham died the following year, leaving his wife with no money and three children to support.
Resourceful as ever, Helen reorganised her life to ensure that her children were well cared for and then threw herself into working even harder than before. Initially family ties caused her to paint within a short rail journey of home, and we find her painting cottages at Pinner [lot ] and Amersham. Later, however, she ventured as far as Kent, to paint the area around Westerham, and returned to Surrey at the invitation of the Tennyson family. Friendship with the Tennysons also led to her staying at their winter residence, 'Farringford', near Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. Here she made many studies of cottages on the poet's estate and in nearby hamlets [lot ].
In the 1890s Helen Allingham was at the height of her popularity, exhibiting regularly in London and occasionally in the provinces. Her reputation as a cottage painter spread abroad, so that her work was requested for exhibitions in Paris, Brussels and even St Petersburg. To supply this insatiable demand for cottage pictures, Helen worked six days a week from dawn till dusk. If the weather became too wet to work out of doors, she spent the time in her studio completing the figures and amimals in her pictures. She moved further afield to Cheshire and Wiltshire and in 1901 and 1902 even visited Venice in search of subjects. The pictures which resulted from these Venetian travels were not, however, popular, and she returned once more to the traditional English cottages which brought her fame.
In July 1926 Helen was staying with W. Graham Robertson, who had taken over her house at Sandhills nearly forty years before. She was, he wrote, 'painting away most industriously as usual ... She is quite wonderful for her age (seventy-seven) and skips up and down hill like a girl'. In September, however, while visiting another old friend in Surrey, she was suddenly taken ill, and died only two days after her seventy-eighth birthday.
Today Helen Allingham's reputation stands as high as it did in the days of her greatest popularity. Admired for the sensitive handling of her subjects, her delicate technique and exquisite detail, she is recognised as one of the great Victorian watercolourists, while her cottage paintings are regarded as pre-eminent.
Ina Taylor, author of Helen Allingham's England: An Idyllic Vie of Rural Life, Webb & Bower 1990
Helen Allingham and the Cottage
It is often claimed that Helen Allingham paints an idealised picture of country life, that those cottages cannot always have been embowered in lupins and clematis, or inhabited by sweet-faced girls in sun-bonnets with nothing to do all day but play with the kitten or admire the latest brood of chicks. This is obviously true not only of her but of many Victorian painters of country cottages. Her friend Tom Taylor, in a poem accompanying Birket Foster's Pictures of English Landscape (1863), admitted the picturesqueness of 'the cottage-homes of England' but continued:
I know ..., too, the plagues that prey
On those who dwell in these bepainted bowers:
The foul miasma of their crowded rooms,
Unaired, unlit, with green damps moulded o'er,
The fever that each autumn deals its dooms
From the dank ditch that stagnates by the door;
And then I wish the picturesqueness less,
And welcome the utilitarian hand
That from such foulness plucks the masquing dress,
And bids the well-aired, well-drained cottage stand,
All bare of weather-stain, right-angled true,
By sketchers shunned, but shunned by fevers too.
Nonetheless, Helen's cottage paintings are not merely escapist. They have an underlying seriousness of purpose, even an element of realism, in that she was trying to capture a way of life and a type of vernacular architecture that were disappearing even as she painted. Seen in this light, they belong to a movement which had long been gathering momentum. Since the 1840s John Ruskin had protested vigorously against the indiscrininate restoration of ancient buildings, both at home and abroad. 'Do not let us talk ... of restoration', he wrote in a famous passage in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), 'the thing is a Lie from beginning to end ... more has been gleaned out of desolated Nineveh than ever will be out of re-built Milan'. In 1874 his anger at architects' irresponsible attitude to restoration led him to refuse a gold medal which the RIBA wished to award him. About the same time F.G. Stephens was waging a campaign on behalf of old buildings in the Atheneum, directing his attacks particularly at that arch-restorer of cathedrals and parish churches, Sir Gilbert Scott. The movement reached a climax in 1877 when William Morris, goaded into action by Scott's work at Tewkesbury Abbey, launched the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings - or the Anti-Scrape Society as it was familiarly know in allusion to the habit of scraping down masonry to give it a 'fresher' appearance. 'It has been most truly said', wrote Morris, 'that these old buildings do not belong to us only: that they belonged to our forefathers and they will belong to our descendants unless we play them false. They are not in any sense our property, to do as we like with them. We are only trustees for those that come after us'.
One of the first to join the Society was Carlyle, a somewhat reluctant recruit who was 'landed' by a cunningly-worded letter from Morris. It would be interesting to know if this influenced Helen Allingham, who was seeing Carlyle almost daily at this time. Possibly she also discussed the subject with Ruskin, whom she met in 1876. At all events, she was one of these enlightened souls who were inspired by the growing concern for the architectural and environmental heritage. During the early years of the SPAB its committee members included the architects Philip Webb, W.R. Lethaby, Ernest Gimson and Detmar Blow, the painters G.P. Boyce and T.M. Rooke, the typographer Emery Walker, and the young Sydney Cockerell, later to make his name as Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. One of the most effective campaigners was Octavia Hill who, inspired by Ruskin, was a tireless advocate of open spaces and commons preservation, and was to help to found the National Trust in 1895. Her country house was at Crockham Hill in Kent, and Helen almost certainly knew her since she was painting there in 1902. Helen's own circle at Witley was full of preservationists, including her husband William, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Birket Foster and Gertrude Jekyll. Helen herself did no active campainging, but William corresponded with Morris about the work of the SPAB, organised petitions against local enclosures, joined the Haslemere Commons Preservation Society, and published an article in the Pall Mall Gazette on the need to preserve footpaths. The Allinghams in fact were typical of many cultured middle-class Victorians who were moving away from the cities and creating a new interest in country life. When they attended Hallam Tennyson's wedding in Westminster Abbey in 1884, William was asked by Dean Bradley 'to find him a cottage in our neighbourhood to run down to'. No doubt the Dean was thinking of something a little more substantial than one of Helen's cottages (Tennyson's 'Aldworth' was conceived as a 'cottage' but ended up resembling a 'small hotel'), but he was probably attracted to the area by its picturesqueness, and would have wanted it kept picturesque if he became a resident.
In the preface to the catalogue of Helen's Surrey Cottages exhibition held at the Fine Art Society in 1886, William wrote that 'in the short time, to be counted by months, since these drawings were made, no few of the Surrey Cottages which they represent have been thoroughly "done up" and some of them swept away'. Helen was recording subjects literally before it was too late, just as Ruskin sent his assistants - Charles Fairfax Murray, T.M. Rooke, J.W. Bunney and others - to record buildings and paintings in Italy before they had perished of neglect or been restored out of existence. Her drawings might have been more faithful memorials if she had left them as images of cottages done on the spot, instead of adding figures and animals in the studio or increasing the number of flowers, often transplanted from other sources such as Gertrude Jekyll's garden at Munstead Wood. She was also not above discreet 'restoration' of her own, removing some unsightly outbuilding or extension, replacing a lattice window, or even adding a thatched roof where she believed it was warranted by her subject. She was, after all, making pictures, not topographical records, and pictures moreover which it was all-important to sell. Nonetheless, so much of her work is objectively accurate that, as the Marley Collection shows, it is often possible to identify the cottages today, while their very survival bears witness to that new-found respect for the past which her paintings express with such feeling and lightness of touch.
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Exhibited
London, The Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, 1896, no. 208 Cottages of Yester-year, 1988-90, no. 1