Mrs. Allingham, whose maiden name was Helen Paterson, was born on September 26, 1848, near Burton-on-Trent, Derbyshire, where her father, Alexander Henry Paterson, M.D., had a medical practice. As her name implies, she is of Scottish descent on the paternal side. A year after her birth her family removed to Altrincham in Cheshire, where her father died suddenly, in 1862, of diphtheria, caught in attending a patient.
This unforeseen blow broke up the Cheshire household, and the widow shortly afterwards wended her way with her young family to Birmingham, where the next few years, the most impressionable of our young artist’s life, were to be spent amid surroundings which at that date were in no wise conducive to influencing her in the direction of Art of any kind.
Scribbling out of her head on any material she could lay hold of (not even sparing the polished surfaces of the Victorian furniture) had been her chief pleasure as a child; and as she grew older she drew from Nature with interest and ease, especially during family visits to Kenilworth and other country and seaside places. Some friends in Birmingham started a drawing club which met each month at houses of the different members, and the young student was kindly invited to join it. Subjects were fixed upon and the drawings were shown and discussed at each meeting. More good resulted from this than might have been expected, for some of the members were not only persons of taste but were collectors of fine examples in Art, which were also seen and considered at the meetings. Helen Paterson, finding that her pen-and-ink productions were more satisfactory than her colour attempts, came to hope that she might gradually qualify herself for book illustration, instead of earning a living by teaching, as she at first anticipated her future would be.
Two influences greatly helped the girl in her artistic desires at this time.
Helen Paterson’s mother’s sister, Laura Herford, had taken up Art as a profession. Although her name does not often appear in Exhibition records, the sisterhood of artists owe her a very enduring debt. For to her was due that opening of the Royal Academy Schools to women to which I have already referred, and which she obtained through another’s slip of the tongue, aided by a successful subterfuge.
Lord Lyndhurst, at a Royal Academy banquet, in singing the praises of that institution, claimed that its schools offered free tuition to all Her Majesty’s subjects. Within a few days he received from Miss Herford a communication pointing out the inaccuracy of his statement, inasmuch as tuition was only given to the male and not to the female sex, which comprised the majority of Her Majesty’s subjects. She therefore appealed to him to use his influence with the Government to obtain the removal of the restriction. He did so, and the Government, on addressing Sir Charles Eastlake, the President of the Royal Academy, found in him one altogether in sympathy with such a reform. He replied to the Government that there was no written law against the admission of women, and after an interview with the lady he connived at a drawing of hers being sent in as a test of her capability for admission as a probationer, under the initials merely of her Christian names. A few days subsequently a notification that he had passed the test and obtained admission arrived at her home addressed to A. L. Herford, Esq. There was of course a demonstration when the lady presented herself in answer to the summons to execute a drawing in the presence of the Keeper; and her claim to stay and do this was vehemently combated by the Council, to whom it was of course referred. But the President demonstrated the absurdity of the situation, and so strongly advocated the untenability of the position that the door was opened once and for all to female students. This lady, who had a strong character in many other directions, constituted herself Art-adviser-in-chief to her young niece from the time of her father’s death.
The other influence under which Helen Paterson came at this critical period was that of a capable and sympathetic master at Birmingham. In Mr. Raimbach, the head of the Birmingham School of Design, she encountered a man who was a teacher, born not made, and who, not being hidebound with the old dry-as-dust traditions, saw and fostered whatever gifts were to be found in his pupils. He it was who, interesting himself in her desire to learn to draw the human figure, and to study more of its anatomy than could be gained from the casts of the School of Design and from the lifeless programme which existed there, encouraged her to go to London for wider study, in the hope of gaining entrance into the Academy Schools, and taking up Art as a profession under her aunt’s auspices.
She followed his advice, gave up a single pupil she had acquired, and passed into the Academy Schools in April 1867 after a short preliminary course at the Female School of Art, Queen’s Square.
British Art may congratulate itself that in Helen Paterson’s case, as in that of so many others, “there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” It is very certain that had the fates ordained that she should remain in Birmingham her talent would never have flowed into the channel which has made possible a memoir of her Art under the title of “Happy England.” The environments of that great city are such that it would have been practically impossible for her artistic training to have been as her divinity decreed it should be, or to place means of exercising it within her grasp should she have desired them.
During the first year or two at the Royal Academy Helen Paterson worked in the antique school, where the study of drawing, proportion of the figure, with some anatomy, precluded the thought of painting. When raised to the painting school she, like many another capable student then as now, was at first driven hither and thither by the variety of and apparently contradictory advice that she received from her masters. For one month she was under a visitor with strongly defined ideas in one direction, and the next under some one else who was equally assertive in another, and it was some time before she could strike a balance for her own understanding. But, for reasons which those who know her well will recognise, she received help and kindness from all, and, as she gratefully remembers, from none more than from Millais, Frederick Leighton, Frederick Goodall, Fred Walker, Stacy Marks, and John Pettie. Millais especially could in a minute or two impart something which was never afterwards forgotten, whilst the encouragement of all was most stimulating to a beginner. Another artist who has been a life-long adviser and the kindest of friends, was Briton Riviere, with whom and whose family an intimacy began even in her student days. An invitation to stay with them at St. Andrews on the coast of Fife in the summer of 1872 inaugurated Miss Paterson’s first serious work from Nature. The result was deemed to be satisfactory by Mr. Riviere, who helped to dissipate a certain despondency and fear which had sprung up in the young artist’s mind as regards her colour powers. It was not, however, in the grey houses and uninteresting streets of this old northern university town, to which she first turned, that the true relations between tone and colour discovered themselves to her longing eye, but amongst the sandbanks, seaweed, and blue water which fringe its noted golf-links. For the first time the artist felt herself happy in attempting to work in any other medium than black and white. Just prior to this fortunate visit she had in the spring of the year been taken by an old friend of the family to Rome, where she had worked assiduously at Nature, but with little satisfaction so far as she herself was concerned.