CHAPTER IV
THE ARTIST’S SURREY HOME
There are few fairer counties in England than Surrey, and of Surrey the fairest portion is admittedly the extreme south-western edge which skirts Sussex to the south and Hampshire to the west. Travellers from London to Portsmouth by the London and South-Western Railway on leaving Guildford pass through the middle of the right angle which this corner makes, and cut the corner two miles beyond Haslemere almost exactly at the point where the three counties meet. As the steep rise of nearly 300 feet which has to be surmounted in the six miles which divide Witley from Haslemere is being negotiated by the train, the most unobservant passenger must be struck by the singularly beautiful wooded character of the country on either side, and by the far-extended view which is unfolded as the eye looks southward over the Weald of Sussex.
It was to Sandhills, near Witley, that Mrs. Allingham came to live in 1881 with her growing family, and it was in this corner of Surrey that she found ample material for almost all her work during the next few years; and it is there that she has returned at intervals for the majority of those cottage subjects which the public has called for, ever since her first portrayal of them shortly after her commencement of landscape painting in these parts.
Witley consists of groups of irregularly-dotted-about houses, which hardly constitute a village, and would perhaps be better designated by the proper name—Witley Street. A few years ago every one of the houses counted their ages by centuries, and were fitting companions of the ancient oaks and elms that shaded them. Some few are left, but the majority are gone, many so long before the term of their natural existence had run that it was a troublesome piece of work to destroy them. There is also an old “Domesday Book” Church. Drawings of almost all of the cottages, from the hand of Mrs. Allingham, are in existence somewhere or other, but she never seems to have painted this or other churches, having apparently little liking for them, as had Birket Foster. In the present case the omission to do so arose from the fact that in painting it she would have formed one of the occupants of half-a-dozen outspread white umbrellas, all taking a stiffly-composed subject from the same point of view.
Sandhills, where our artist lived, is on the Haslemere side of Witley, on a sloping common of heather and gorse, topped with fir trees. From thence the view, looking southwards, extends far and wide over the Weald of Surrey and Sussex, Hindhead, a mountain-like hill rising behind, and Blackdown, a spur stretching out on to the Sussex Valley to the right. In the distance are to be seen the rising grounds near Midhurst and Petworth, Chanctonbury Ring with its tuft of trees, called locally “The Squire’s Hunting Cap,” and on a clear day the downs as far as Brighton and Lewes.
It is indeed a healthy and bracing spot, and one calculated to induce a painter to energetic work, and a delight in doing it. Subjects lay close at hand, the Sandhills garden furnishing many a one. “Master Hardy’s,” a charming cottage tenanted by a charming old man, was within a stone’s throw, and received attention inside and out. Of the Hindhead Road, which passes south-west, a single Exhibition, that of 1886, contained six subjects, all of them wayside cottages, but no one of which, when the Exhibition opened, was as depicted, having in that short time been “done up” by local builders at the bidding of Philistine owners.
The neighbourhood round is, or perhaps we should say was, also prolific in subjects—Haslemere, four miles south-west, with its pleasant wide old streets, and with fields tilted up at the end of it, furnished its Fish-Shop, and other thoroughly English village scenes.
Some two miles south of Haslemere was Aldworth, Lord Tennyson’s house, a mile over the Sussex border, although always spoken of as his “Surrey” residence. To Mrs. Allingham’s work there we shall have occasion to refer later on.
The varied summits of Hindhead (painted a century earlier by Turner and Rowlandson, and at that time adorned with a gibbet for the benefit of the highwaymen who infested the Portsmouth Road, which passes over it), in one place bare moor, in another crested with fir trees, lay some distance northward of Haslemere; but our artist did not often depict them, although they presented themselves under many a charming aspect, and never more glorious than at sunset in their robes of violet and gold. A thoroughly characteristic view of them is however given in the Lord Chief Justice’s drawing ([Plate 19]).
To the southward of Sandhills stretches, as we have said, the Weald. To this district Mrs. Allingham made frequent excursions, not only for cottages, which she found at Hambledon, Chiddingfold, and Wisborough, but for spring and autumn subjects in the oak woods and copses which to this day probably bear much the same aspect as did the ancient Forest of Anderida (whose site they occupy) in the time of the Heptarchy.