HAPPY ENGLAND

AGENTS IN AMERICA
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
66 Fifth Avenue, New York

1. PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

Fradelle & Young.

H. Allingham (signature)

Beautiful Britain
HAPPY ENGLAND
BY HELEN ALLINGHAM, R.W.S.
TEXT BY MARCUS B. HUISH
ROYAL CANADIAN EDITION
LIMITED TO 1000 SETS

CAMBRIDGE CORPORATION, LIMITED
MONTREAL
A. & C. BLACK, LONDON

Contents

List of Illustrations

The illustrations in this volume have been engraved and printed by the Hentschel Colourtype Company.

Happy England

CHAPTER I
OUR TITLE

To choose a title that will felicitously fit the lifework of an artist is no easy matter, especially when the product is a very varied one, and the producer is disposed to take a modest estimate of its value.

In the present case the titles that have suggested themselves to one or other of those concerned in the selection have not been few, and a friendly contest has ensued over the desire of the artist on the one hand to belittle, and of author and publishers on the other to fairly appraise, both the ground which her work covers and the qualities which it contains.

The first point to be considered in giving the volume a name was that it forms one of a series in which an endeavour—and, to judge by public appreciation, a successful endeavour—has been made to illustrate in colour an artist’s impressions of a particular country: as, for instance, Mr. John Fulleylove’s of the Holy Land, Mr. Talbot Kelly’s of Egypt, and Mr. Mortimer Menpes’s of Japan. Now Mrs. Allingham throughout her work has been steadfast in her adherence to the portrayal of one country only. She has never travelled or painted outside Europe, and within its limits only at one place outside the British Isles, namely, Venice. Even in her native country her work has been strictly localised. Neither Scotland nor Wales has attracted her attention since the days when she first worked seriously as an artist, and Ireland has only received a scanty meed, and that due to family ties. England, therefore, was the one and only name under which her work could be included within the series, and that has very properly been assigned to it.

But it will be seen that to this has been added the prefix “Happy,” thereby drawing down the disapprobation of certain of the artist’s friends, who, recognising her as a resident in Hampstead, have associated the title with that alliterative one which the northern suburbs have received at the hands of the Bank Holiday visitant; and they facetiously surmise that the work may be called “’Appy England! By a Denizen of ’Appy ’Ampstead!”

But a glance at the illustrations by any one unacquainted with Mrs. Allingham’s residential qualifications, and by the still greater number ignorant even of her name (for these, in spite of her well-earned reputation, will be the majority, taking the countries over which this volume will circulate), must convince such an one that the “England” requires and deserves not only a qualifying but a commendatory prefix, and that the best that will fit it is that to which the artist has now submitted.

We say a “qualifying” title, because within its covers we find only a one-sided and partial view of both life and landscape. None of the sterner realities of either are presented. In strong opposition to the tendency of the art of the later years of the nineteenth century, the baser side of life has been studiously avoided, and nature has only been put down on paper in its happiest moods and its pleasantest array. Storm and stress in both life and landscape are altogether absent. We say, further, a “commendatory” title, because as regards both life and landscape it is, throughout, a mirror of halcyon days. If sickness intrudes on a single occasion, it is in its convalescent stage; if old age, it is in a “Haven of Rest”; the wandering pedlar finds a ready market for her wares, the tramp assistance by the wayside. In both life and landscape it is a portrayal of youth rejoicing in its youth. For the most part it represents childhood, and, if we are to believe Mr. Ruskin, for the first time in modern Art; for in his lecture on Mrs. Allingham at Oxford, he declared that “though long by academic art denied or resisted, at last bursting out like one of the sweet Surrey fountains, all dazzling and pure, you have the radiance and innocence of reinstated infant divinity showered again among the flowers of English meadows of Mrs. Allingham.”

This healthiness, happiness, and joy of life, coupled with an idyllic beauty, reveals itself in every figure in Mrs. Allingham’s story, so that even the drudgery of rural life is made to appear as a task to be envied.

And the same joyous and happy note is to be found in her landscapes. Every scene is

Full in the smile of the blue firmament.

One feels that

Every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

Rain, wind, or lowering skies find no place in any of them, but each calls forth the expression

What a day
To sun one and do nothing!

No attempt is made to select the sterner effects of landscape which earlier English painters so persistently affected. With the rough steeps of Hindhead at her door, the artist’s feet have almost invariably turned towards the lowlands and the reposeful forms of the distant South Downs. Cottages, farmsteads, and flower gardens have been her choice in preference to dales, crags, and fells.

And in so selecting, and so delineating, she has certainly catered for the happiness of the greater number.

What does the worker, long in city pent, desire when he cries

’Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven?

And what does the banished Englishman oftenest turn his thoughts to, even although he may be dwelling under aspects of nature which many would think far more beautiful than those of his native land? Browning in his “Home Thoughts from Abroad” gives consummate expression to the homesickness of many an exile:—

Oh! to be in England
Now that April’s there!

And Keats also—

Happy is England! I could be content
To see no other verdure than its own,
To feel no other breezes than are blown
Through its tall woods, with high romances blent.

These, the poets’ longings, suggested the prefix for which so lengthy an apology has been made, and which, in spite of the artist’s demur, we have pressed upon her acceptance, confident that the public verdict will be an acquittal against any charge either of exaggeration, or that he who excuses himself accuses himself.

If an apology is due it is in respect of the letterpress. The necessity of maintaining the size to which the public has been accustomed in the series of which this forms a part, and of interleaving the numerous illustrations which it contains, means the provision of a certain number of words. Now an artist’s life that has been passed amid such pleasant surroundings as has that of Mrs. Allingham, cannot contain a sufficiency of material for the purpose. Indulgence must, therefore, be granted when it is found that much of the contents consists merely of the writer’s descriptions of the illustrations, a discovery which might suggest that they were primarily the raison d’être of the volume.

As regards the illustrations, a word must be said.

The remarkable achievements in colour reproduction, through what is known as the “three-colour process,” have enabled the public to be placed in possession of memorials of an artist’s work in a way that was not possible even so recently as a year or two ago. Hitherto self-respecting painters have very rightly demurred to any colour reproductions of their work being made except by processes whose cost and lengthy procedure prohibited quantity as well as quality. Mrs. Allingham herself, in view of previous attempts, was of the same opinion until a trial of the process now adopted convinced her to the contrary. Now she is happy that a leap forward in science has enabled renderings in little of her water-colours to be offered to thousands who did not know them previously.

The water-colours selected for reproduction have been brought together from many sources, and at much inconvenience to their owners. Both artist and publishers ask me to take this opportunity of thanking those whose names will be found in the List of Illustrations, for the generosity with which they have placed the originals at their disposal.

It was Mrs. Allingham’s wish that the illustrations should be placed in order of date, and this has been done as far as possible; but this and the following chapter being in a way introductory, it has been deemed advisable to interleave them with three or four which do not fall in with the rest as regards subject or locality. For reasons of convenience the description of each drawing is not inserted in the body, but at the end of the chapter in which it appears.

2. IN THE FARMHOUSE GARDEN
From the Water-colour in the possession of the Artist.
Painted 1903.

A portrait of Vi, the daughter of the farmer at whose house in Kent Mrs. Allingham stays.

Mrs. Allingham was tempted to take up again her disused practice of portrait-painting, by the attraction of the combination of the yellow of the child’s hair and hat, the red of the roses, and the blue of the distant hillside.

3. THE MARKET CROSS, HAGBOURNE
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mrs. E. Lamb.
Painted 1898.

Berkshire, in spite of its notable places and situation, does not boast of much in the way of county chronicles, and little can be learnt by one whose sole resource is a Murray’s Guide concerning the interesting village where the scene of this drawing is laid, for it is there dismissed in a couple of lines.

Hagbourne, or Hagborne, is one of the many “bornes” which (in the counties bordering on the Thames, as elsewhere) takes its Saxon affix from one of the burns or brooks which find their way from thence into the neighbouring river. It lies off the Great Western main line, and its fine church may be seen a mile away to the southward just before arriving at Didcot. This proximity to a considerable railway junction has not disturbed much of its old-world character.

The buildings and the Cross, which make a delightful harmony in greys, probably looked much the same when Cavalier and Puritan harried this district in the Civil War, for with Newbury on one side and Oxford on the other, they must oftentimes have been up and down this, the main street of the village. The Cross has long since lost its meaning. The folk from the countryside no longer bring their butter, eggs, and farm produce for local sale. The villagers have to be content with margarine, French eggs, and other foreign commodities from the local “stores,” and the Cross steps are now only of use for infant energies to practise their powers of jumping from. So, too, the sun-dial on the top, which does not appear to have ever been surmounted by a cross, is now useless, for everybody either has a watch or is sufficiently notified as to meal times by a “buzzer” at the railway works hard by.

Mrs. Allingham says that most of her drawings are marked in her memory by some local comment concerning them. In this case a bystander sympathetically remarked that it seemed “a mighty tedious job,” in that of “Milton’s House” that “it was a foolish little thing when you began”—the most favourable criticism she ever encountered only amounting to “Why, it’s almost worth framing!”

4. THE ROBIN
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. S. H. S. Lofthouse.
Painted 1898.

One of the simplest, and yet one of the most satisfying of Mrs. Allingham’s compositions.

It is clearly not a morning to stay indoors with needlework which neither in size nor importance calls for table or chair. Besides, at the cottage gate there is a likelier chance of interruption and conversation with occasional passers-by. But, at no time numerous on this Surrey hillside, these are altogether lacking at the moment, and the pink-frocked maiden has to be content with the very mild distraction afforded by the overtures of the family robin, who is always ready to open up converse and to waste his time also in manœuvres and pretended explorations over ground in her vicinity, which he well knows to be altogether barren of provender.

CHAPTER II
PAINTRESSES, PAST AND PRESENT

Man took advantage of his strength to be
First in the field: some ages have been lost;
But woman ripens earlier, and her life is longer—
Let her not fear.

The fair sex is so much in evidence in Art to-day (the first census of this century recording the names of nearly four thousand who profess that calling) that we are apt to forget that the lady artist, worthy of a place amongst the foremost of the other sex, is a creation of modern growth.

Paintresses—to call them by a quaint and agreeable name—there have been in profusion, and an author, writing a quarter of a century ago, managed to fill two bulky volumes[1] with their biographies; but the majority of these have owed both their practice and their place in Art to the fact of their fathers or husbands having been engaged in that profession.

History has recorded but little concerning the women artists who worked in the early days of English Art. The scanty records which, however, have come down to us prove that if they lived uneventful lives they did so in comfort. For instance, it is noted of the first that passes across the pages of English history, namely Susannah Hornebolt (all the early names were foreign), that she lived for many years in great favour and esteem at the King’s Court, and died rich and honoured: of the next, Lavinia Teerlinck, that she also died rich and respected, having received in her prime a higher salary than Holbein, and from Queen Elizabeth, later on in life, a quarterly wage of £41. Farther on we find Charles I. giving to Anne Carlisle and Vandyck, at one time, as much ultramarine as cost him £500, and Anna Maria Carew obtaining from Charles II. in 1662 a pension of £200 a year. About the same time Mary Beale, who is described as passing a tranquil, modest existence, full of sweetness, dignity, and matronly purity, earned the same amount from her brush, charging £5 for a head, and £10 for a half-length. She died in 1697, and was buried under the communion table in St. James’s, Piccadilly, a church which holds the remains of other paintresses.

Another, Mary Delaney, described as “lovely in girlhood and old age,” and who must have been a delightful personage from the testimonies which have come down to us concerning her, lived almost through the eighteenth century, being born in 1700, and dying in 1788, and being, also, buried in St. James’s. She has left on record that “I have been very busy at my usual presumption of copying beautiful nature”; but the many copies of that kind that she must have made during this long life are all unknown to those who have studied Art a hundred years later.

Midway in the eighteenth century we come across the great and unique event in the annals of Female Art, namely the election of two ladies to the Academic body, in the persons of Angelica Kauffman—who was one of the original signatories of the memorial to George III., asking him to found an Academy, and who passed in as such on the granting of that privilege—and Mary Moser, who probably owed her election to the fact that her father was Keeper of the newly-founded body.

The only other lady artists who flit across the stage during the latter half of that century—in the case of whom any attempt at distinction or recognition is possible—were Frances Reynolds, the sister of the President, and the “dearest dear” of Dr. Johnson, and Maria Cosway, the wife of the miniaturist. These kept up the tradition of ladies always being connected with Art by parentage or marriage.

The Academy catalogues of the first half of the nineteenth century may be searched in vain for any name whose fame has endured even to these times, although the number of lady exhibitors was considerable. In the exhibitions of fifty years ago, of 900 names, 67, or 7 per cent, were those of the fair sex, the majority being termed in the alphabetical list “Mrs. ——, as above”; that is to say, they bore the surname and lived at the same addresses as the exhibitor who preceded them.[2]

The admission of women to the Royal Academy Schools in 1860 must not only have had much to do with increasing the numbers of paintresses, but in raising the standard of their work. In recent years, at the annual prize distributions of that institution, when they present themselves in such interesting and serried ranks, they have firmly established their right to work alongside of the men, by carrying off many of the most important awards.[3]

The Royal Female School of Art, the Slade School, and Schools of Art everywhere throughout the country each and all are now engaged in swelling the ranks of the profession with a far greater number of aspirants to a living than there is any room for.

This invasion of womankind into Art, which has also shown itself in a remarkable way in poetry and fiction, is in no way to be decried. On the contrary, it has come upon the present generation as a delightful surprise, as a breath of fresh and sweet-scented air after the heavy atmosphere which hung over Art in the later days of the nineteenth century. To mention a few only: Miss Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler), Lady Alma Tadema, Mrs. Jopling, Miss Dicksee, Mrs. Henrietta Rae, Miss Kemp Welch, and Miss Brickdale in oil painting; Mrs. Angell, Miss Clara Montalba, Miss Gow, Miss Kate Greenaway, and Mrs. Allingham in water-colours have each looked at Art in a distinguished manner, and one quite distinct from that of their fellow-workers of the sterner sex.

The ladies named all entered upon their profession with a due sense of its importance. Many of them may perhaps be counted fortunate in having commenced their careers before the newer ideas came into vogue, by virtue of which anybody and everybody may pose as an artist, now that it entails none of that lengthy apprenticeship which from all time has been deemed to be a necessary preliminary to practice. Even so lately as the date when Mrs. Allingham came upon the scene, draftsmanship and composition were still regarded as a matter of some importance if success was to be achieved. Nature, as represented in Art, was still subjected to a process of selection, a selection, too, of its higher in preference to its lower forms. The same pattern was not allowed to serve for every tree in the landscape whatever be its growth, foliage, or the local influences which have affected its form. A sufficient study of the human and of animal forms to admit of their introduction, if needful, into that landscape was not deemed superfluous. Most important of all, beauty still held the field, and the cult of unvarnished ugliness had not captured the rising generation.

The endeavours of women in what is termed very erroneously the higher branch of the profession, have not as yet received the reward that is their due. Placed at the Royal Academy under practically the same conditions as the male sex whilst under tuition, both as regards fortune and success, their pictures, when they mount from the Schools in the basement to the Exhibition Galleries on the first floor of Burlington House, carry with them no further possibility of reward, even although, as they have done, they hold the pride of place there. It is true that as each election to the Academic body comes round rumours arise as to the chances of one or other of the fair sex forcing an entrance through the doors that, with the two exceptions we have named, have been barred to them since the foundation of the Institution. The day, however, when their talent in oil painting, or any other art medium, will be recognised by Academic honours has yet to come.

To their honour be it said, the undoubted capacities of ladies have not passed unrecognised by water-colour painters. Both the Royal Society and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours have enrolled amongst their ranks the names of women who have been worthy exponents of the Art.

The practice of water-colour art would appear to appeal especially to womankind, as not only are the constituents which go to its making of a more agreeable character than those of oil, but the whole machinery necessary for its successful production is more compact and capable of adaptation to the ordinary house. The very methods employed have a certain daintiness about them which coincides with a lady’s delicacy. The work does not necessitate hours of standing, with evil-smelling paints, in a large top-lit studio, but can be effected seated, in any living room which contains a window of sufficient size. There is no need to leave all the materials about while the canvasses dry, and no preliminary setting of palettes and subsequent cleaning off.

Yet in spite of this the water-colour art during the first century of its existence was practised almost solely by the male sex, and it was not until the middle of the Victorian reign that a few women came on to the scene, and at once showed themselves the equals of the male sex, not only so far as proficiency but originality was concerned. In the case of no one of these was there any imitation or following of a master; but each struck out for herself what was, if not a new line, certainly a presentation of an old one in a novel form. Mrs. Angell, better known perhaps as Helen Coleman, took up the portrayal of flowers and still life, which had been carried to such a pitch of minute finish by William Hunt, and treated it with a breadth, freedom, and freshness that delighted everybody. It secured for her at once a place amid a section of water-colourists who found it very difficult to obtain these qualities in their work. Miss Clara Montalba went to Venice and painted it under aspects which were entirely different from those of her predecessors, such as James Holland; and she again has practically held the field ever since as regards that particular phase of atmospheric effect which has attracted attention to her achievement. The kind of work and the subjects taken up by Mrs. Allingham will be dealt with at greater length hereafter, but I may premise by saying that she, too, ultimately settled into methods that are entirely her own, and such as no one can accuse her of having derived from anybody else.

The following illustrations find a place in this chapter:—

5. MILTON’S HOUSE, CHALFONT ST. GILES
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mrs. J. A. Combe.
Painted 1898.

The popularity of a poet can hardly be gauged by the number of visitors to the haunts wherein he passed his day. Rather are they numbered by the proximity of a railroad thereto. Consequently it is not surprising that the pilgrims to the little out-of-the-way Buckinghamshire village where Milton completed his Paradise Lost are an inconsiderable percentage of those who journey to Stratford-on-Avon. For though Chalfont St. Giles lies only a short distance away from the twenty-third milestone on the high-road from London to Aylesbury, it is some three miles from the nearest station—a station, too, where few conveyances are obtainable. Motor cars which will take the would-be pilgrim in an hour from a Northumberland Avenue hotel may increase its popularity, but at present the village of the “pretty box,” as Milton called the house, is as slumberous and as little changed as it was in the year 1665, when Milton fled thither from his house in Artillery Ground, Bunhill Row, before the terror of the plague.[4] Milton was then fifty-seven, and is described as a pale, but not cadaverous man, dressed neatly in black, with his hands and fingers gouty, and with chalk-stones. He loved a garden, and would never take a house, not even in London, without one, his habit being to sit in the sun in his garden, or in the colder weather to pace it for three or four hours at a stretch. Many of his verses he composed or pruned as he thus walked, coming in to dictate them to his amanuensis, and it was from the vernal to the autumnal equinox that his intermittent inspiration bore its fruit. His only other recreation besides conversation was music, and he sang, and played either the organ or the bass viol. It was at Chalfont that Milton put into the hands of Ellwood his completed Paradise Lost, with a request that he would return it to him with his judgment thereupon. It was here also that on receiving Ellwood’s famous opinion, “Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?” he commenced his Paradise Regained. He returned to London after the plague abated, in time to see it again devastated by the fresh calamity of the great fire.

An engraving of this house appears in Dunster’s edition of Paradise Regained, and an account in Todd’s Life of Milton, p. 272; also in Jesse’s Favourite Haunts, p. 62.

6. THE WALLER OAK, COLESHILL
From the Water-colour in the possession of the Artist.
Painted 1902.

That several of Mrs. Allingham’s drawings should illustrate scenes connected with Great Britain’s poets is not remarkable, seeing that her life has been so intimately bound up with one of them, but it is at first somewhat startling to find that the two selected for illustration here should treat of Milton and Waller, for was it not the latter who said of Paradise Lost that it was distinguished only by its length. The accident that has brought them together here is perhaps that the two scenes are near neighbours, and, may be, the artist was tempted to paint the old oak through kindly sentiments towards the author of the sweet-smelling lines, “Go, Lovely Rose,” by which his name endures.

Coleshill, where the oak stands, is a “woody hamlet” near Amersham, and a mile or two away from Chalfont St. Giles. The tree which bears his name, and under which he is said to have composed much of his verse, dates from long anterior to the late days of the Monarchy, when he was more engaged in hatching plots than in writing verse. If, as is probable, he viewed and sought its comforting shade, he can hardly have believed that it would survive the fame of him who received such praise from his contemporaries as to be acclaimed “inter poetas sui temporis facile princeps.”

7. APPLE AND PEAR BLOSSOM
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. Theodore Uzielli.
Painted 1901.

A charming little picture made out of the simplest details is this spring scene in an Isle of Wight lane. But if the details are of the simplest character, as much cannot be said for the methods employed by the artist in their treatment. These are so intricate that the drawing was perhaps the most difficult of any to reproduce, owing to the impossibility of accurately translating the subtle gradations which distinguish the tender greenery of trees, hedgerow, and bank.

CHAPTER III
THE ARTIST’S EARLY WORK

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.

She had by this time fully made up her mind to embark on a career in which she was determined, and was in fact obliged, to earn a living; and as her colour work at present had no market, there was nothing for it but to procure a livelihood by black and white. Wood engraving, although nearing the end of its existence, was still the only medium of cheap illustration. Photography later on came to its aid to a certain extent, but the majority of the original drawings continued to be drawn directly on to the wood block. There were still close upon a hundred wood engravers employed in London, working for the most part under master engravers, into whose hands the publishers of magazines, illustrated periodicals, and books entrusted, not only the cutting of the block, but the selection of the artist to make the drawing upon it.

It was to these that Helen Paterson had to look for work, and it was upon a round of their offices that in the autumn of 1869 she diffidently started with a portfolio full of drawings. Employment did not come at once, and the list of seventy names with which she started had been considerably reduced before, to her great satisfaction, a drawing out of her sheaf was taken by Mr. Joseph Swain, to whom she had an introduction, for submission to the proprietors of Once a Week. It was accepted, and she copied it on to the wood. Gradually she obtained work for other magazines, including Little Folks, published by Cassell, and Aunt Judy, by George Bell, the drawings for Aunt Judy illustrating Mrs. Ewing’s A Flat Iron for a Farthing, Jan of the Windmill, and Six to Sixteen.

The first alteration of any magnitude of the custom to which reference has been made, namely, of the artist having to look to the engraver for work, occurred when the Graphic newspaper was started in the year 1870. Mr. W. L. Thomas, to whom the credit of this improvement in the status of the worker in black and white was due, was himself an artist and a member of the Institute of Painters in Water Colours. As such he was not only in touch with, but capable of appreciating the unusual amount of budding talent of abundant promise which was just then presenting itself. This he enlisted in the service of the Graphic upon what may be termed co-operative terms, for those who liked could have half their payment in cash and half in shares in the venture. Many, the majority we believe, unfortunately could not afford the latter proposition. Unfortunately indeed, for the paper embarked on a career which has yielded dividends, at times of over a hundred per cent, and has kept the shares at a premium, which few companies in existence can boast of. This phenomenal success was in a large measure the result of the personal interest that was brought to bear upon every department, and that every employé took in his share in it. The illustrations, upon which success mainly depended, were not the product of a formulated system, working in a groove, where blocks were served out to artists as to a machine, without any regard to their fitness for the particular piece of work. Artists of capacity, whose names are now to be found amongst the most noted in the academic roll, were selected for the particular illustration that suited them, and were well paid for it. The public was not only astonished at, but grateful for, the result, and showed their appreciation by at once placing the Graphic in the high position which it deserved and has since enjoyed.

Helen Paterson was so fortunate as to be brought into touch with Mr. Thomas shortly after the first appearance of the paper. She had obtained some work from one Harrall, an engraver, with whom Mr. Thomas had had business connections in the past, and it was at Harrall’s suggestion that she went to Mr. Thomas, who at once offered her a place on the staff of the Graphic, a place which she retained until her marriage in 1874. It was indeed a godsend to her, for it meant not only regular work but handsome pay. Twelve guineas for a full, and eight for a half page, and at least one of these a week, meant not merely maintenance, but a reserve against that rainy day which, fortunately, the subject of our memoir has never had to contend with.

The subjects which Miss Paterson was called upon to produce were of the most diversified character, but all of them had figures as their main feature. To properly limn these she had to employ regular models, but she also enlisted the aid of her fellow-students, for she was still at the Royal Academy, and her sketch-books of that time, of which she has many, are full of studies of artists, no few of whom have since become celebrated in the world of Art.

Looking through the pages of the Graphic with the artist, it is interesting to note the variety of episodes upon which Mr. Thomas employed her. Her drawings were not always from her own sketches, being at times from originals that had been sent to the paper in an embryo condition necessitating entire revision, or from rapid notes by artists sent to represent the paper at important functions. But on occasions she was also deputed to attend at these, and in consequence underwent some novel experiences for a young girl. A meeting at Mr. Gladstone’s, Fashions in the Park, Flower Shows at the Botanical Gardens, Archery at the Toxophilite Society’s,—these formed the lighter side of her work, the more serious being the illustration of novels by novelists of note. This was at the time a new feature in journalism. Amongst those entrusted to her were Innocent, by Mrs. Oliphant, and Ninety-Three, by Victor Hugo. For the murder trial in the former she had to visit the Central Criminal Court, and through so doing was more accurate than the authoress, who admittedly had not been there, and whose work consequently showed several glaring mistakes, such as the prisoner addressing the judge by name. She was also employed upon a novel of Charles Reade’s in conjunction with Mr. Luke Fildes and Mr. Henry Woods. This she undertook with extreme diffidence, for Reade had sent round a circular saying that he greatly disliked having his stories illustrated at all; but as it had to be in this case, he begged to notify that he gave situations, whilst George Eliot and Anthony Trollope only gave conversations, and he requested that good use should be made of these situations. Meeting him some years afterwards, the author paid her the compliment of saying he liked her illustration of the heroine in his story the best of any.

Nor was Miss Paterson entirely dependent upon the Graphic, whose illustrations, oftentimes given out in a hurry, had to be finished within a period limited by hours. She was fortunate to be numbered amongst the select few who worked for the Cornhill, for which she was, through Mr. Swain’s kind offices, asked to illustrate Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, which was at first attributed to George Eliot. The author was fairly complimentary as to the result, although he said it was difficult for two minds to imagine scenes in the same light. Later on she had the pleasant task of illustrating Miss Thackeray’s Miss Angel in the same magazine. The drawing of Sir Joshua Reynolds asking Angelica to marry him, perhaps the best of the series, was one of the first to be signed with the name of Allingham, by which she has since been known.

A very interesting acquaintance with Sir Henry Irving, which has lasted ever since, was commenced in the early seventies through her having to visit the Lyceum for the Graphic to delineate him and Miss Isabel Bateman in Richelieu. Mr. Bateman, who was then the manager, placed a box at her disposal, which she occupied for several nights whilst making the drawing. One of the cottage drawings reproduced here ([Plate 77]) belongs to Sir Henry.

Although working regularly and almost continuously at black and white during these years she managed to intersperse it with some work in colour, and at the exhibitions of the old Dudley Gallery Art Society, which had been recently founded, and which had proved a great boon to rising and amateur art, she exhibited water-colours under the title of “May,” “Dangerous Ground,” and “Soldiers’ Orphans watching a bloodless battle at Aldershot,” painted in the studio from a Graphic drawing.

In the autumn of the year 1874 Miss Paterson was married to Mr. William Allingham, the well-known poet, editor of Fraser’s Magazine, and friend of so many of the celebrities in literature, science, and art of the middle of the last century, amongst whom may be mentioned Carlyle, Ruskin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Browning, and Tennyson. It was to be near the first named that the newly married couple went to reside in Trafalgar Square, Chelsea, where they passed the next seven years of their married life, namely until 1881.

To Carlyle Mrs. Allingham had the privilege of frequent and familiar access during his last years; and when he found that he was not expected to pose to her, and that she had, as he emphatically declared, a real talent for portraiture (the only form of pictorial art in which he took any interest), he became very kind and complaisant, and she was able to make nearly a dozen portraits of him in water-colours. An early one, which he declared made him “look like an old fool,” was painted in the little back garden of No. 5 Cheyne Row, which was not without shade and greenery in the summer time. There, in company with his pet cat “Tib,” and a Paisley churchwarden (“no pipe good for anything,” according to him, “being get-at-able in England”), he indulged in smoking, the only creature comfort that afforded him any satisfaction. In these portraits he is depicted sitting in his comfortable dressing-gown faded to a dim slaty grey, refusing to wear a gorgeous oriental garment that his admirers had presented to him. An etching of one of these drawings appeared in the Art Journal for 1882. Other portraits were painted in the winter of 1878-79, in his long drawing-room with its three windows looking out into the street.

Rossetti she never saw, although he had been an intimate friend of her husband’s for twenty years[5] and was then living in Chelsea, for he was just entering on that unfortunate epoch preceding his death, when he was induced to cut himself adrift from all his old circle of acquaintances. The fact is regrettable, for it would have been interesting to note his opinion of a lady’s work with which he must have been in full sympathy.

Mr. Allingham had known Ruskin for many years. His wife’s acquaintance began in interesting fashion at the Old Water-Colour Society’s. She happened to be there during the Exhibition of 1877 at a time when the room was almost empty. Mr. Ruskin had been looking at her drawing of Carlyle, and introducing himself, asked her why she had painted Carlyle like a lamb, when he ought to be painted like a lion, as he was, and whether she would paint the sage as such for him? To this she had to reply that she could only paint him as she saw him, which was certainly not in leonine garb. One afternoon soon afterwards, Mr. Allingham chanced to meet Ruskin at Carlyle’s, and brought him round to see her work. She was at the time engaged on the drawing of “The Clothes-Line” ([Plate 11]), and he objected to the scarlet of the handkerchief, and also to the woman, who he said ought to have been a rough workwoman, an opinion which Mrs. Allingham did not share with him at the time, but which she has since felt to be a correct one. He also saw another drawing with a grey sky, and asked her why she did not make her skies blue. To her reply that she thought there was often great beauty in grey skies, he growled, “The devil sends grey skies.”

Browning, an old friend of her husband’s, Mrs. Allingham sometimes had the privilege of seeing during her residence in London. One occasion was typical of the man. He had been asked to come and see her work, which was at the time arranged at one end of a room at Trafalgar Square, Chelsea, before sending in to the Exhibition. The drawings were naturally small ones, and Browning appeared to be altogether oblivious to their existence. Turning round, with his back to them, he at once commenced a story of some one who came to see an artist’s work, and the artist was very huffed because his visitor never took the slightest notice of his pictures, but talked to him of other subjects all the time. This, Browning considered, was no sufficient ground for his huffiness. His obliviousness to Mrs. Allingham’s drawings may have been due to his having been accustomed to the pictures of his son, which were of large size, and in comparison with which Mrs. Allingham’s would be quite invisible. Against this theory, however, I may mention that on one occasion I happened to have the good fortune to be present in his son’s studio when Tennyson was announced. Browning at once advanced to the door to meet him, bent low, and addressed him as “Magister Meus,” and although the Laureate had come to see the paintings, and stayed some time, neither of the two poets, so long as I was present, noticed them in any way.

Whilst Mrs. Allingham was painting Carlyle, Browning came to see him, and they held a most interesting and delightful conversation on the subject of the great French writers. The alteration in Browning’s demeanour from his usual bluff and breezy manner to a quiet, deferential tone during the conversation was very notable.

Of her intimacy with Tennyson I may speak later when we come to the drawings which illustrate his two houses in Sussex and the Isle of Wight.

The year of her marriage was also a landmark in Mrs. Allingham’s career, through the Royal Academy accepting and hanging two water-colours, one entitled “The Milkmaid,” the other, “Wait for Me,” the subject of the latter being a young lady entering a cottage whilst a dog watched her outside the gate. It would have been interesting to have been able to insert a reproduction of either of these in this volume, for they would probably have shown that her fear as to her inability to master colour was entirely without basis, but I have not been able to trace them. The drawings were not only well hung, but were sold during the Exhibition.

It was, however, by another drawing that Mrs. Allingham won her name.

In the year 1875 she was commissioned by Mr. George Bell to make a water-colour from one of the black-and-white drawings which she had done some years before for Mrs. Ewing’s A Flat Iron for a Farthing. We shall have occasion to describe at length, later on, this delightful little picture that is reproduced in [Plate 8]. It is only necessary for our purpose here to state that it was seen early in 1875 by that prince of landscape water-colourists, Mr. Alfred Hunt.

He was an old friend of Mr. Allingham’s, and being told that his wife was thinking of trying for election at the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, kindly offered to go through her portfolios. The From these he made a selection, and promised to propose her at an election which was about to take place. The result fully proved the soundness of his choice, for the candidate not only secured the rare distinction of being elected on the first time of asking, but the still rarer one of securing her place in that body, so notable for its diversity of opinion when candidates are in question, with hardly a dissentient vote.

Ladies were not admitted to the rank of full members of the Society until the year 1890, when she was, to her great pleasure and astonishment, elected a full member. She deserved it; for much of the charm of these exhibitions had been due to the presence of the work which she has contributed to every Exhibition held since her election save two, one of these rare absences being due to her having mistaken the date for sending in.

This election, and the fact that after her marriage she could afford to do without the monetary aid derived from black-and-white work, decided her to embark upon water-colours; although in these she still confined her work to figure subjects, more than one of which continued to be founded on her previous work in monochrome.

The last book in which her name as an illustrator appeared was, appropriately enough, Rhymes for the Young Folk, by her husband, published in Cassell’s in 1885, to which she contributed most of the illustrations. She relinquished black-and-white work without any regret, for although she was much indebted to it, it never held her sympathies, and she always longed to express herself in colour, the medium in which she instinctively felt she had ultimately the best chance of success.

Although we are only separated from the Chelsea of Mrs. Allingham’s days by little more than a quarter of a century, its artistic associations were then of a very different order to those that are in evidence nowadays. The era of vast studios in which duchesses and millionaires find adequate surroundings for their portraits was not yet. Whistler was close to old Chelsea Church, a few doors only from where he recently died. Tite Street, with which his name will always be connected, was not yet built. He was still engaged on those remarkable, but at that time insufficiently appreciated, canvases of scenes which have now passed away, such as “Fireworks at Cremorne,” and “Nocturnes” dimly disclosing old Battersea Bridge. Seymour Haden was etching the picturesque façade of the Walk, with his brother-in-law’s house as a principal object in it, and without the respectable embankment which now makes it more reputable from a hygienic, but less admirable from an artistic point of view. Rossetti was practically the only other artist of note in the quarter. But with one exception Mrs. Allingham’s work was not reminiscent of the place. That exception, however, disclosed to her a field in which she foresaw much delight and abundant possibilities. In the old Pensioners’ Garden at Chelsea Hospital were to be found tenderly-cared-for borders of humble flowers. The garden itself was a haven of repose for the old warriors, and a show-place for their visitors. Mrs. Allingham, like another artist, Hubert Herkomer, about the same time, was touched by the pathos of the surroundings, and, chiefly on the urgency of her husband, she ventured on a drawing of more importance than any hitherto attempted. The subject, which we shall speak of again later, was finished in 1877, and was the first large drawing exhibited by her at the Society of Painters in Water Colours.

Painters—good, bad, and indifferent—of the garden are nowadays such a numerous body that one is apt to forget that the time is quite recent when to paint one with its flowers was a new departure. It is nevertheless the fact, and in taking it up, especially those that are associated with the humbler type of cottages, Mrs. Allingham was practically the originator of a new subject. To the pensioners’ patches at Chelsea we are indebted for the sweet portraits of humble flower-steads which are now cherished by so many a fortunate possessor, and charm every beholder. Thus Chelsea aroused a desire to attack gardens possessing greater possibilities than a town-stunted patch, a desire that was not, however, gratified until two years later when, during a visit in the spring of 1879 to Shere, the first of many cottages and flowers was painted from nature.

In 1881, after the death of Carlyle, Chelsea had attractions for neither husband nor wife, and with a young family growing up and calling for larger and healthier quarters, the house in Trafalgar Square was given up for one at Witley in Surrey, a hamlet close to Haslemere, which she had visited the year before, and in the midst of a country which Birket Foster had already done much to popularise, having resided at a beautiful house there for many years.

The water-colours of this first period, namely from 1875 to 1880, that are reproduced here, are the following:—

8. THE YOUNG CUSTOMERS
From the Water-colour in the possession of Miss Bell.
Painted 1875.

The drawing by which, as we have said, Mrs. Allingham made her name, obtained election at the Society of Painters in Water Colours, was represented at her first appearance there in 1875, and also at the Paris Exposition in 1878, and through which she obtained the recognition of Ruskin, who thus wrote concerning it in the Notes which he was at that time in the habit of compiling each year on the Summer Exhibitions.

It happens curiously that the only drawing of which the memory remains with me as a possession out of the Old Water-Colour Exhibition of this year—Mrs. Allingham’s “Young Customers”—should not only be by an accomplished designer of woodcuts, but itself the illustration of a popular story. The drawing, with whatever temporary purpose executed, is for ever lovely—a thing which I believe Gainsborough would have given one of his own paintings for, old fashioned as red-tipped daisies are, and more precious than rubies.

Later on, in 1883, in his lectures at Oxford on Mrs. Allingham he again referred to it as “The drawing which some years ago riveted, and ever since has retained the public admiration—the two deliberate housewives in their village toyshop, bent on domestic utilities and economies, and proud in the acquisition of two flat irons for a farthing—has become, and rightly, a classic picture, which will have its place among the memorable things in the Art of our time, when many of its loudly-trumpeted magnificences are remembered no more.”

The black-and-white drawing on which it was founded, a somewhat thin and immature performance, was one of twelve illustrations made by Mrs. Allingham for Mrs. Ewing’s A Flat Iron for a Farthing,[6] where it appears as illustrating the following episode. It will be seen that Mrs. Allingham’s version of the story differs in many points from that of the authoress, which is thus told by Reginald, the only son:—

As I looked, there came down the hill a fine, large, sleek donkey, led by an old man-servant, and having on its back what is called a Spanish saddle, in which two little girls sat side by side, the whole party jogging quietly along at a foot’s pace in the sunshine. I was so overwhelmed and impressed by the loveliness of these two children, and by their quaint, queenly little ways, that time has not dimmed one line in the picture that they then made upon my mind. I can see them now as clearly as I saw them then, as I stood at the tinsmith’s door in the High Street of Oakford—let me see, how many years ago?

The child who looked the older, but was, as I afterwards discovered, the younger of the two, was also the less pretty. And yet she had a sweet little face, hair like spun gold, and blue-grey eyes with dark lashes. She wore a grey frock of some warm material, below which peeped her indoors dress of blue. The outer coat had a quaint cape like a coachman’s, which was relieved by a broad white crimped frill round her throat. Her legs were cased in knitted gaiters of white wool, and her hands in the most comical miniatures of gloves. On her fairy head she wore a large bonnet of grey beaver, with a frill inside. But it was her sister who shone on my young eyes like a fairy vision. She looked too delicate, too brilliant, too utterly lovely, for anywhere but fairyland. She ought to have been kept in tissue-paper, like the loveliest of wax dolls. Her hair was the true flaxen, the very fairest of the fair. The purity and vividness of the tints of red and white in her face I have never seen equalled. Her eyes were of speedwell blue, and looked as if they were meant to be always more or less brimming with tears. To say the truth, her face had not half the character which gave force to that of the other little damsel, but a certain helplessness about it gave it a peculiar charm. She was dressed exactly like the other, with one exception—her bonnet was of white beaver, and she became it like a queen.

At the tinsmith’s shop they stopped, and the old man-servant, after unbuckling a strap which seemed to support them in their saddle, lifted each little miss in turn to the ground. Once on the pavement the little lady of the grey beaver shook herself out, and proceeded to straighten the disarranged overcoat of her companion, and then, taking her by the hand, the two clambered up the step into the shop. The tinsmith’s shop boasted of two seats, and on to one of these she of the grey beaver with some difficulty climbed. The eyes of the other were fast filling with tears, when from her lofty perch the sister caught sight of the man-servant, who stood in the doorway, and she beckoned him with a wave of her tiny finger.

“Lift her up, if you please,” she said on his approach. And the other child was placed on the other chair.

The shopman appeared to know them, and though he smiled, he said very respectfully, “What articles can I show you this morning, ladies?”

The fairy-like creature in the white beaver, who had been fumbling in her miniature glove, now timidly laid a farthing on the counter, and then turning her back for very shyness on the shopman, raised one small shoulder, and inclining her head towards it, gave an appealing glance at her sister out of the pale-blue eyes. That little lady, thus appealed to, firmly placed another farthing on the board, and said in the tiniest but most decided of voices,

“Two flat irons, if you please.”

Hereupon the shopman produced a drawer from below the counter, and set it before them. What it contained I was not tall enough to see, but out of it he took several flat irons of triangular shape, and apparently made of pewter, or some alloy of tin. These the grey beaver examined and tried upon a corner of her cape, with inimitable gravity and importance. At last she selected two, and keeping one for herself, gave the other to her sister.

“Is it a nice one?” the little white-beavered lady inquired.

“Very nice.”

“Kite as nice as yours?” she persisted.

“Just the same,” said the other firmly. And having glanced at the counter to see that the farthings were both duly deposited, she rolled abruptly over on her seat, and scrambled off backwards, a manœuvre which the other child accomplished with more difficulty. The coats and capes were then put tidy as before, and the two went out of the shop together, hand in hand.

Then the old man-servant lifted them into the Spanish saddle, and buckled the strap, and away they went up the steep street, and over the brow of the hill, where trees and palings began to show, the beaver bonnets nodding together in consultation over the flat irons.

The commission to paint this water-colour being unfettered in every way, the artist felt herself at liberty to create a colour scheme of her own—hence the changes in the dresses, etc.; also to put an old woman (after a Devonshire cottager) in place of the shopman, and to make the shop a toyshop instead of a tinsmith’s. The little girl ironing was painted from a study of a Mr. Hennessy’s eldest little daughter; the fair little maiden from Mr. Briton Riviere’s eldest daughter.

9. THE SAND-MARTINS’ HAUNT
From the Water-colour in the possession of Miss James.
Painted 1876.

I passed an inland cliff precipitate;
From tiny caves peeped many a soot-black poll.
In each a mother-martin sat elate,
And of the news delivered her small soul:
“Gossip, how wags the world?” “Well, gossip, well.”

Interesting not only as the earliest example here of Mrs. Allingham’s landscape work, having been painted at Limpsfield, Surrey, in May 1876, and as such full of promise of better things to come, but as an instance of a preference for a complex and very difficult effect, which the artist, on obtaining greater experience, very wisely abandoned. There is little doubt that she was tempted by the glorious wealth of colouring which a low sun threw upon the warm quarry side, the pine wood, and the huge cumuli which banked them up—a magnificent but a fleeting effect, which could only be placed on record from very rapid notes. The result could be successful only in the hands of a practised adept, and it is not surprising, therefore, that in those of an artist just embarking on her career it was not entirely so. The difficulties of the task may have afforded her a useful lesson, for we have seen no further attempts on her part at their repetition.

If the landscape foretells little concerning the future of the artist, the figures standing on the brink of the quarry, the elder with her arm placed lovingly and protectingly round the neck of the younger, whilst they watch the martins rejoicing in the warm summer evening, are eminently suggestive of the success which Mrs. Allingham was to achieve in the addition of figures to landscape composition.

10. THE OLD MEN’S GARDENS, CHELSEA HOSPITAL
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. Charles Churchill.
Painted 1876.

Contemporary criticism is not, as a rule, palatable to an artist, for amongst the varied views which the art critics bring to their task there are always to be found some that are not seen from the same standpoint as his. Besides, for some occult reason, the balance always trends in the direction of fault-finding rather than praise, probably because it is so much the easier, for work always has and will have imperfections that are not difficult to distinguish. But in the case of the water-colour before us the critics’ chorus must have been very exhilarating to the young artist, especially as, at the time of its exhibition at the Royal Water-Colour Society, in the spring of 1877, she was by no means in good health. The Spectator, for instance, wrote that artists would have to look to their laurels when ladies began to paint in a manner little inferior to Walker. The Athenæum gave it the exceptional length of a column, considering it “one of the few pictures by which the exhibition in question would be remembered.” Tom Taylor in the Times wrote as follows:—

Of all the newly associated figure painters there is none whose work has more of the rare quality that inspires interest than Mrs. Allingham. She has only two drawings here, a pretty little child’s head and a large and exquisitely finished composition, “The Old Men’s Gardens, Chelsea Hospital,” where some hundred and forty little garden plots are parcelled out among as many of the old pensioners, each of whom is free to follow his own fancies in his gardening.

In the hush of a calm summer evening, two graceful girls in white dresses accept a nosegay from one of the veterans, a Guardsman of the vieille cour, by his look and bearing. All around are plots of sweet, bright flowers all aglow with variegated petals. Here and there under the shade of the old trees sit restful groups of the old veterans, with children about them; one little fellow reverentially lifts and examines one of the medals on a war-worn breast. Behind, the thickly-clothed fronds of a drooping ash spread to the declining sun, and the level roofs of the old Hospital rise ruddy against the warm and cloudless sky. No praise can be too high for the exquisiteness with which the flowers are drawn, coloured, and combined, or for the skill with which they are blended into an artistic whole with the suggestive and graceful group in the foreground. The drawing deserves to take its place as a pendant of Walker’s “Haven of Rest.”

It is curious that all the critics seem to have misinterpreted the main meaning of the artist’s motive, namely, that whilst the Pensioners naturally, in the first place, wish to sell their posies, they are always ready to give them to those who cannot afford to buy. The well-to-do ladies are purchasing the flowers, the little group of mother, boy, and baby, on the right, who can ill afford to buy, are having a posy graciously offered to them. The drawing represented Mrs. Allingham at the Jubilee Exhibition in Manchester, 1887, and the Loan Water-Colour Exhibition at the Guildhall, London, in 1896. It is of the large size, for this artist’s work, of 25 inches by 15 inches.

11. THE CLOTHES-LINE
From the Water-colour in the possession of Miss James.
Painted 1879.

How considerable and rapid an advance now took place in Mrs. Allingham’s powers may be seen from the two drawings which are dated two years later, namely, in 1879. In figure draftsmanship there is no comparison between the timid and haltingly painted children of “The Sand-Martins’ Haunt” and the seated baby in “The Clothes-Line.” In the first the capacity to draw was no doubt present, but the power to express it through the medium of water-colour was as yet unacquired. But after two years’ study, knowledge is present in its fulness, and from now onwards the only changes in Mrs. Allingham’s work are a greater precision, breadth, facility of handling, and harmony of colour. The figure of the woman still smacks somewhat too much of the studio, and she is a lady-like model,[7] certainly not the type one would expect to see hanging out the washing of such a clearly limited and humble wardrobe as in this case. The figure again detaches itself too much from the rest of the picture, and Mrs. Allingham, we are sure, would now never introduce such a jarring note as the scarlet and primrose handkerchief, to which Mr. Ruskin objected at the time it was painted. The blanket, clothes-line, clothes-basket, and other accessories are painted with a minuteness which was an admirable prelude to the breadth that was to follow; but are singularly constrained in comparison with the yellow gorse bushes, most difficult of any shrubs to limn, but which here are noteworthy for unusual easiness of touch. Even with these qualifications the picture is a delightful one, replete with grace and beauty, and complete in its portrayal of the little incident of the baby, a less robust little body than Mrs. Allingham would now paint, capturing as many of the clothes-pegs that her mother needs as her small fingers and arms can embrace.

12. THE CONVALESCENT
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. R. S. Budgett.
Painted 1879.

This, like “The Young Customers,” was founded on previous work, namely, a black-and-white drawing made for the Graphic, as an illustration to Mrs. Oliphant’s Innocent. But in the story the patient dies from an over-dose administered in mistake by Innocent, who is nursing her. Some years afterwards the poisoning comes to light, and Innocent is tried and acquitted. Mrs. Allingham would never have voluntarily repeated such a subject as this, and her temperament is shown in her having utilised the material for one in which refreshing sleep promises a speedy recovery.

13. THE GOAT CARRIAGE
From the Water-colour in the possession of Sir F. Wigan.
Painted 1880.

Painted at Broadstairs, and containing portraits of Mrs. Allingham’s children. Noticeable as being one of a few drawings where the artist has introduced animals of any size into her compositions, but showing that, had she minded, she might have animated her landscapes with them with as conspicuous success as she has with her human figures. Perhaps an incident which happened whilst this picture was being painted deterred her. Billy being tied up so as to keep him in somewhat the same position, managed to gnaw through his rope, and, irate at his detention, he made for the lady to whom he thought his captivity was due, and nearly upset her, paintbox, and picture. The exhibition of this and kindred portraits of her children under such titles as “The Young Artist” and “The Donkey Ride,” led to strangers wishing for portraits of their offspring under similar winsome conditions. But Mrs. Allingham never cared for the restraint imposed by portrait painting, and the few that she did in this manner were undertaken more from friendship than from pleasure.

14. THE CLOTHES-BASKET
From the Water-colour the property of Mr. C. P. Johnson.
Painted 1880.

It is very seldom that Mrs. Allingham has treated her public to drawings with low horizons or sunsets, perhaps for the reason that little of her life has been spent away in the flatter counties, where the latter are so noticeable and full of charm and beauty. This water-colour, the first large landscape that the artist exhibited, was painted from studies made in the Isle of Thanet, whilst staying at Broadstairs.

15. IN THE HAYLOFT
From the Water-colour the property of Miss Bell.
Painted 1880.

This is practically the last of the water-colours which were the outcome of earlier pictures executed in black and white for the illustration of books.

The story is from Deborah’s Drawer, by Eleanor Grace O’Reilly, for which, as Helen Paterson, our artist had made nine drawings in 1870, at a time when she was so inexperienced in drawing on the wood that in more than one instance her monogram appears turned the wrong way. Mr. Bell, the publisher of the book, subsequently commissioned her to make a companion water-colour to “The Young Customers,” and suggested one of the illustrations called “Ralph’s Girls” as the basis for a subject.

The little black-robed girls were twins, whose mother had recently died, and who had been placed under the care of a grandmother, who forgot their youth and spirits. They were imaginative children, and indulged in delightfully original games. One (that of personating a sportsman named Jenkins and a dog called Tubbs, who together went partridge-shooting through a big field of cabbages laden with dew) they had just been taking part in. Tired out with it, they decided to be themselves again, and to mount to the hayloft and play another favourite game, that of “remembering.” This meant taking them back over their short lives, which ended up with their most recent remembrance, their mother’s death. Whilst talking over this they are summoned from their retreat, and have to appear with their black dresses soaked with the dew from the cabbages, and with hay adhering everywhere to their deep crape trimmings. Hence much penance!

16. THE RABBIT HUTCH
From the Drawing the property of Mr. C. P. Johnson.
Painted 1880.

Painted in London, but from sketches made near Broadstairs, the house seen over the wall being one of those that are to be found along the east coast, which bear a decided evidence of Dutch influence in their architecture. Here again we have evidence that Mrs. Allingham might, had she been so minded, have succeeded with animals as well as she has with human figures and landscape. A little play is being enacted; the dog, evidently a rival of the inhabitants of the hutch, has to be kept at a distance while their feeding is going on, lest his jealousy might find an outlet in an onslaught upon them.

17. THE DONKEY RIDE
From the Water-colour in the possession of Sir James Kitson, Bart., M.P.
Painted 1880.

This drawing was executed just at the turning of the ways, when London was to be exchanged for country life, and studio for out-of-door painting. What an increased power came about through the change will be seen by a comparison between this “Donkey Ride” and the “Children’s Tea” ([Plate 23]). Only two years separate them in date; but whilst in the one we have timidity and hesitancy, in the other the end is practically assured. In “The Donkey Ride” we have evidences of experiments, especially in the direction of finicking stippling (all over the sea and sky) and of the use of body-colour (in the baby’s bonnet and the flowers), which were abandoned later on, to the artist’s exceeding great benefit. What we expect to find, and do find, is the pure sentiment, and the dainty freshness, which is never absent from the earliest efforts onwards.

The scene is the cliffs near Broadstairs, Mrs. Allingham’s two eldest children occupying the panniers.

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.

Oak is the tree of the wealden clay on the lower levels, but elms grow to a grand size on the higher ground, where ashes are also numerous. Spanish chestnuts “encamp in state” on certain slopes, and many of the hills are “fringed and pillared” with pines. The interminable hazel copses are interspersed with long labyrinthine paths, the intricacies of which are only known to the countryside folk. Not so long ago the cutting down at intervals of the young wood for the purposes of hop poles, hurdles, and kindling, brought in a handsome revenue to the owners; but of late years wire has taken the place of wood for the two first of these objects, and the labourers prefer dear coal to wood, even as a gift, for it does not entail cutting up. As railway rates to bring it to the metropolis are prohibitive, it is hard to say what the consequences will be in a few years, but the probabilities actually point to a return to the primitive conditions which existed in the Saxon times to which we have referred.

In the spring the country round is decked with primroses, bluebells, and cowslips in the woods, hedgerows, and fields, being fortunately outside the range of the marauders from London; and it is indeed pleasurable to ramble from copse to field, and back again. But in autumn and winter the deep clay soil makes it heavy travelling in the deep-cut roads and lanes, cumbered with the redolent decay of the leafage from the trees.

The cottars were, when the majority of these drawings were made, rural and old-fashioned, and many had lived hereabouts through numerous generations. A quiet, taciturn folk, contented with moderate comforts, on good terms with their wealthier neighbours, not often feeling the pinch of poverty.

Maybe all are not so good-looking as Mrs. Allingham has depicted them, but they vary much, some being flaxen Saxons, others as dark complexioned as gipsies.

As will be seen, they have a taste and enjoyment for colour, if not for change, in the gardens with which their cottages are fairly well supplied. These are bright at one or other season of the year with snowdrop, crocus, and daffodil, lilac, sweetwilliam, and pink, sunflower, Michaelmas daisy, and chrysanthemum.

The following drawings have been selected as illustrating the neighbourhood of Mrs. Allingham’s home at Sandhills:—

18. A WITLEY LANE
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. H. W. Birks.
Painted 1887.

It is very seldom that we encounter a drawing of Mrs. Allingham that deals with Nature in winter’s garb. In this respect she differs from Birket Foster, who rightly considered that trees were oftentimes as beautiful in their nude as in their clothed array. Especially did he delight in the towering framework of the elm, which he regarded as the most typical of English trees.

Nor is it often that we see Mrs. Allingham afield so early in the spring as in this lane scene, where the elms are clothed only in their “ruddy hearted blossom flakes.”[8] Perhaps this absence is due to prudential reasons, to avoid the rheumatism which appears to be the only ailment which the landscapist runs against in his healthy outdoor profession.

Those who have seen the woods of Surrey and Sussex at this time of year know what a lovely colour they assume in the budding stage, a colour that makes the view over the Weald from such a vantage-ground as Blackdown a sea of ravishing violet hues, almost equalling that of the oak forests as seen in February from the Terrace at Pau, which stretch away to the snow-clad range of the Pyrenees—perhaps the most delicately perfect view in Europe. But the day selected for this sketch was evidently a warm one for the time of year, or we should not see that unusual occurrence, an open bedroom window in a labourer’s cottage.

The flowering whin is no index to the season, for we know the old adage—

When the whin’s in bloom, my love’s in tune.

But the catkins on the hazel, and the primroses on the banks, must place it round that elastic date, Eastertide.

These wayside primroses remind one of a strongly expressed opinion of Mrs. Allingham’s, that wayside flowers should never be gathered, but left for the enjoyment of the passers-by—a liberal one, which was first instilled into her by her husband, who wrote verses upon it, from which I cull the following lines:—

Pluck not the wayside flower,
It is the traveller’s dower;
A thousand passers-by
Its beauties may espy.

19. HINDHEAD FROM WITLEY COMMON
From the Water-colour in the possession of the Lord Chief Justice of England.
Painted 1888.

When this drawing appeared in the Exhibition of 1889 there were some who called in question the truthfulness of the colour of distant Hindhead, affirming that it was too blue. But when the air comes up in August from the southward, laden with a salty moisture, and the shadows are cast by hurrying clouds over the distance, it is altogether and exactly of the hue set down here. Had the effect been incorrect it would hardly have been acquired by so critical a collector as Lord Alverstone, nor would it have been hung in his Surrey home, where it invites daily comparison with Nature under similar aspects. The drawing was painted on the spot, from just behind the artist’s house, and is one of the few instances where she has added to the charm of her work by a sky of some intricacy. In her cottage and other drawings, where buildings or other landscape objects are of primary importance, she has felt that the simpler the treatment of the sky the better, and with good reason. Here, where a large expanse calls for interesting forms to cover it, she has shown her complete ability to introduce them.

Mrs. Allingham’s house at Sandhills was below the foreground slope, to the right of the cottages whose roofs rise from the ling. The highest point of Hindhead seen here is Hurt Hill, some nine hundred feet above sea-level, a name which Mr. Allingham always held to be a corruption of Whort Hill, from the whortleberries with which its slopes are covered, and which in these, as in other parts are called “wurts.”

20. IN WITLEY VILLAGE
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. Charles Churchill.
Painted 1884.

This drawing was in The Fine Art Society’s Exhibition in 1886, the catalogue stating that the cottage had disappeared in the spring of 1885. It was pulled down by its owner to be replaced by buildings whose monotonous symmetry, to his eye no doubt, appeared in better taste. The cottage was still far from the natural term of its existence, as evidenced by the troublesome piece of work it was to dislocate the sound, firm old oaken beams of which its framework was built up. Mr. Birket Foster, who equally with Mrs. Allingham mourned its disappearance, regretted that he could not rebuild it in his own grounds.

The blackening elms, and the ripe bracken carried home by the cottar, show that the time when this picturesque dwelling was painted was late summer, probably that of 1884. Mrs. Allingham was clearly then not of Ruskin’s opinion concerning the wrongness of painting trees in full leaf, for she found the blue-black of the trees a harmonious background to her red and russet roof.

The work throughout shows a loving fidelity to Nature, as if the artist had felt that she was looking upon the likeness of an old friend for the last time, and wished to perpetuate every lineament and feature.

21. BLACKDOWN FROM WITLEY COMMON
From the Water-colour in the possession of Lord Davey.
Painted 1886.

This view is taken from the same bridle-path as is seen in Lord Alverstone’s “Hindhead,” but at a lower elevation, and looking some points more to the south; also at a later time of year, probably in early October, to judge by the browning hazels. The bracken-covered elevation in the distance is Grays Wood Common, which lies to the south of the railway, and the spur of blue hill seen in the distance is Blackdown. Aldworth, Lord Tennyson’s seat, lies just this side of where the hill falls away. The drawing is one of three only in the whole collection where Mrs. Allingham has introduced a draught animal.

22. THE FISH-SHOP, HASLEMERE
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. A. E. Cumberbatch.
Painted 1887.

One can well understand the local builder in his daily round past this picturesque little tenement casting longing eyes upon its uneven roof, its diamond-paned lattices, its projecting shop front, and its spoutless eaves, which allowed the damp to rise up from the foundations and the green lichen to grow upon its walls, and that he rested not until he had set hands upon it, and taken one more old-world feature from the main thoroughfare at Haslemere. Such was actually the case here, for the shop has long ago disappeared, but it was not until, much to its owner’s regret, interference was necessary. Were it not that it indeed was the fish-shop of Haslemere, it might well have served for the toyshop in which the scene of “The Young Customers” was laid. In the days when this was painted the accommodation provided was probably sufficient for the intermittent supply of an inland village, for Haslemere was not, until the last few years, a country resort for those who seek fine air and beautiful scenery, and can afford to pay a high price for it.

CHAPTER V
THE INFLUENCE OF WITLEY

It will be readily understood that such a beneficial change in her life surroundings as that from Trafalgar Square, Chelsea, to Sandhills, Witley, was not without its effect upon Mrs. Allingham’s Art. Hitherto her work had, by the exigencies of fortune, lain almost wholly and entirely in the direction of the figure. It was studio work, done for the most part under pressure of time, the selection of subject being none of hers, and therefore oftentimes altogether unsympathetic. Finding herself now in the presence of Nature of a kind that appealed to her, and which she could appreciate untrammelled by any conditions, it is not surprising that—unwittingly, no doubt, at first—the preference was given to that side of Art which presented itself under so much more favourable conditions.

The delight of painting en plein air had first been tasted at Shere in the spring and summer of 1878, where she was passionately happy in watching the changes and developments of the seasons, being in the fields, lanes, and copses all day and every day.[9] Almost as full a feast had followed at Haslemere in 1880. When these were succeeded by a permanent residence in front of Nature, studio work became more and more trying and unsatisfactory.

To most people of an artistic temperament the abandonment of the figure for landscape would never have been the subject of a moment’s consideration, for it would have appeared to them the desertion of a higher for a lower grade of Art. But from the time of her arrival in the country there seems to have never been any doubt in Mrs. Allingham’s mind as to the direction which her Art should take. The pleasure to which we have referred of sitting down in the open air before Nature, whose aspects and moods she could select at her own will, and at her own time, was infinitely preferable to the toil and trouble of either illustrating the ideas of others, or building up scenes, oftentimes improbable ones, of her own creation. From this time onwards, then, we find her drifting away from the figure, but not altogether, or at once, for as her family grew up, scenes in her house life passed across her view which she enjoyed to place on record, and for which the world thanks her: scenes of infant life in the nursery, such as “Pat-a-cake” and “The Children’s Tea”; in the schoolroom, such as “Lessons”; and out of school hours, such as “Bubbles” and “The Children’s Maypole.” In one and all of these it is her own family who are the chief actors.

The portrayal of her children in heads of a larger size than her usual work was at this time seen by friends and others, who pressed upon her commissions for effigies of their own little ones, a branch of work which promptly drew down upon her the disapproval of Ruskin, who wrote: “I am indeed sorrowfully compelled to express my regret that she should have spent unavailing pains in finishing single heads, which are at the best uninteresting miniatures, instead of fulfilling her true gift, and doing what the Lord made her for in representing the gesture, character, and humour of charming children in country landscapes.”

But this change naturally did not pass over her work all at once, or even in a single year. Mrs. Allingham’s presentations of the countryside commenced in earnest shortly after her settling down at Witley in 1881; but as will be seen by the dates of the pictures which illustrate this chapter, the figure as the dominant feature continues for another six years; in fact, during the whole of her seven and a half years at Witley we find it now and again, and do not part with it as such until 1890. Since then hardly a single example has come from her brush. Mrs. Allingham gives as her reason for the change that she came to the conclusion that she could put as much interest into a figure two or three inches high as in one three times as large, and that she could paint it better; for in painting large figures out of doors it was always a difficulty in making them look anything else than they were, namely, “posing models.”

But if the figure ceases to occupy the foremost position, it is still there, and is always present to add a charming vitality to all that she does. To people a landscape with figures, of captivating mien, each taking its proper position, and each adding to the interest of the whole, is a gift which is the property of but few landscapists. It is indeed a gift, for we have before us the example of the greatest landscapist of all, who the more he strove the more he failed. But it is a gift which we believe many more might obtain by strenuous endeavour. It is always a matter of surprise to the ignorant public how it comes to pass that an artist who can draw nature admirably should never attempt to learn the draftsmanship of the human figure, by the omission of which from his work he deprives it of half its interest and value. He often goes a step further, and shows not his inability but his indolence by producing picture after picture, upon the face of which no single instance occurs of the introduction of man, beast, or bird, save and except a single unpretentious creature of the lowest grade of the feathered creation; this, however, he will draw sufficiently well to prove that he could, an he would, double the interest in his landscapes. To the outsider this appears incomprehensible in the person of those who apparently are thorough artists, ardent in their profession. One meets such an one at table, and even between the courses he cannot refrain from taking out his pencil and covering the menu with his scribblings; but the same man appears before Nature without a note-book, in which he might be storing so many jottings, which would be of untold value to his work.

Mrs. Allingham’s case has been the entire contrary to this; she has, I will not say toiled, for the garnering must be a pleasure, but stored, many a time and oft, for future use, a mass of valuable material, so that she is never at a loss for the right adjunct to fit the right place. Her so doing was, in the first instance, due entirely to her husband. He said, truly, that the introduction of animals and birds, in fact, any form of life, gave scale and interest to a picture, and he urged her to begin making studies from the first. There is not the slightest doubt that she owed very much to him that habit of thinking out fitting figures, as she has always tried, and with exceptional success, as accessories to every landscape.

Her sketch-books, consequently, are full not only of men, women, and children, and their immediate belongings, but of most of the animal life which follows in their train. I say “most,” because for some reason, which I have not elicited from her, she has preferences. Horses, cattle, and sheep she will have but little of, only occasionally introducing them in distant hay or harvest fields. The only instances of anything akin to either in this book are the animals in “The Goat Carriage,” and “The Donkey Ride.” Nor will she have much to say to dogs, but for cats she has a great fondness, and they animate a large number of her scenes. Fowls, pigeons, and the like she paints to the life, and she apparently is thoroughly acquainted with their habits; but other winged creatures, save an occasional robin, she avoids. Rabbits, wild and tame, she often introduces.

Her pictures being always typical of repose, she avoids much motion in her figures. Her children even, seldom indulge in violent action, unlike those of Birket Foster, who run races down hill, use the skipping-rope, fly kites, and urge the horses in the lane out of their accustomed foots-pace.

As typical examples of the drawings made in the early days at Witley, and whilst the figure was the main object, we have selected the following:—

23. THE CHILDREN’S TEA
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. W. Hollins.
Painted 1882.

This is the most important, and, to my mind, the most delightful of any of Mrs. Allingham’s creations; quite individual, and quite unlike the work of any one else. Not only is the subject a charming one, but the actors in it all hold one’s attention. It is certainly destined in the future to hold a high place among the examples of English water-colour art.

The scene is laid in Mrs. Allingham’s dining-room at Sandhills, Witley, and contains portraits of her children. The incidents are slight but original. The mother is handing a cup of tea, but no one notices it, for the eldest girl’s attention is taken up with the old cat lapping its milk, her younger sister, with her back to the window, is occupied in feeding her doll, propped up against a cup, from a large bowl of bread and milk, and the two other children are attracted to a sulphur butterfly which has just alighted on a glass of lilies of the valley. The etceteras are painted as beautifully as the bigger objects; note, for instance, the bowl of daffodils on the old oak cupboard, the china on the table, and even the buns and the preserves. The whole is suffused with the warmth of a spring afternoon, the season being ascertainable by the budding trees outside, and the spring flowers inside. Exception may be taken to the faces not being more in shadow from a light which, although reflected from the tablecloth, is apparently behind them, and to the tablecloth being whiter than the sky, which it would not be. The fact, as regards the former, is that the faces were also lit from a window behind the spectator, whilst the latter is a permissible licence.

24. THE STILE
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. Alfred Shuttleworth.
Painted 1883.

The effort of negotiating a country stile, such as the one here depicted, which has no aids in the way of subsidiary steps, always induces a desire to rest by the way. Especially is this the case when a well-worn top affords a substantial seat. Time is evidently of little importance to the two sisters, for they have lingered in the hazel copse gathering hyacinths and primroses. Besides, the little one has asserted her right to a meal, and that would of itself be a sufficient excuse for lingering on the journey. The dog seems of the same way of thinking, and is evidently eagerly weighing the chances as to how much of the slice of bread and butter will fall to its share.

The drawing is a rich piece of colouring, but the hedgerow bank, with its profusion and variety of flowers, shows just that lack of a restraining hand which is so evident in Mrs. Allingham’s fully-matured work. It was painted entirely in the open air, close to Sandhills, and the model who sat for the little child is now the artist’s housemaid.

25. “PAT-A-CAKE”
From the Water-colour in the possession of Sir F. Wigan, Bt.
Painted 1884.

This drawing, although painted later than “The Children’s Tea,” would seem to be the prelude to a set in which practically the same figures take a part.

The motive here, as in all Mrs. Allingham’s subjects, is of the simplest kind. The young girl reads from nursery rhymes that time-honoured one of “Pat-a-cake, Pat-a-cake, Baker’s Man.” It is apparently her younger brother’s first introduction to the bye-play of patting, which should accompany its recitation, for the child regards the performance with some doubt, and has to be trained by the nurse as to how its hands should be manœuvred.

The drawing is full of details, such as the workbox, scissors, thimble, primroses, and anemones in the bowl, the china in the cupboard, and the coloured engraving on the wall, which, as we have seen in the case of other painters who have practised it, opens up in fuller maturity a power of painting which is never possible to those who have neglected such an education.

26. LESSONS
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. C. P. Johnson.
Painted 1885.

The relations between the teacher and the taught appear to be somewhat strained this summer morning, for the little girl in pink is evidently at fault with her lessons, and the boy, while presumably figuring up a sum on his slate, has his eyes and ears open for a break in the silence which fills the room for the moment. However, in a short time it will be halcyon weather for all the actors, for the sun is streaming in at the window, the roses show that it is high summer, and a day on which the sternest teacher could not condemn the most intractable child to lengthy indoor imprisonment.

This drawing is of the same importance as regards size as “The Children’s Tea,” and is full of charm in every part.

27. BUBBLES
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. H. B. Beaumont.
Painted 1886.

Lessons are over, a stool has been brought from the schoolroom, the kitchen has been invaded, and the dish of soapsuds having been placed upon it the fun has begun. Who, that has enjoyed it, will forget the acrid taste of the long new churchwarden (where do the children of the present day find such pipes if they ever condescend to the fascinating game of bubble-blowing?) that one naturally sucked away at long before the watery compound was ready, the still more pungent taste of the household soap, the delight of seeing the first iridescent globe detach itself from the pipe and float upwards on the still air, or of raising a hundred globules by blowing directly into the basin, as the smocked youngster is doing here. Such joys countervailed the smarts which befell one’s eyes when the burst bubble scattered its fragments into them, or when the suds came to an end, not through their dissipation into air, but over one’s clothes.

28. ON THE SANDS—SANDOWN, ISLE OF WIGHT
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mrs. Francis Black.
Painted about 1886.

The family of young children that was now growing up round our artist naturally necessitated the summer holiday assuming a visit to the seaside, and much of Mrs. Allingham’s time was, no doubt, spent on the shore in their company. It is little matter for surprise that this pleasure was combined with that of welding them into pictures; and, if an excuse must be made for Mrs. Allingham oftentimes robing her little girls in pink, it is to be found in the fact that the models were almost invariably her own children, who were so attired. It certainly will not be one of the least agreeable incidents for those who saunter over the illustrations of this volume to distinguish them and trace their growth from the cradle onwards, until they pass out of the stage of child models.

This drawing was painted on the shore at Sandown, Isle of Wight, where the detritus of the Culver chalk cliffs afforded, in combination with the sand, splendid material for the early achievements in architecture and estate planning which used to yield so healthy an occupation to youngsters.

It was a hazardous task to attempt success with such a variety of tones of white as here presented themselves, but the result is entirely satisfactory. In fact the drawing shows how readily and with what success the painter took up another phase of outdoor work, not easy of accomplishment. In those collections which include these seashore subjects they single themselves out from all their neighbours by the aptitude with which figures and a limpid sea are painted in sunshine. This, again, is no doubt due to their having been entirely out-of-doors work.

29. DRYING CLOTHES
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. C. P. Johnson.
Painted 1886.

This important drawing, in which the figure is on a large scale, makes one regret that Mrs. Allingham abandoned her portraiture, for a more captivating life study it is hard to imagine. Flattery apart, one may say that Frederick Walker never drew a more ideal figure or conceived a more charming colour scheme. The only feature which would perhaps have been omitted from a later work is that of the foxgloves in the corner, which appears to be rather an artificial introduction. The note of the little child behind the gate is charming. It is evidently not allowed to wander in the field, although the well-worn path shows that here is the main road to the cottage, and it feels that a joy is denied it not to be allowed to participate in the ceremony of gathering in of the family washing, as it was in younger days when the clothes were hung out.

30. HER MAJESTY’S POST OFFICE
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. H. B. Beaumont.
Painted 1887.

This, at the time it was painted, was the only Post Office of which Bowler’s Green, near Haslemere, boasted, and from its appearance it might well have served during the reigns of several of Her Majesty’s predecessors. It speaks much for the absence of ill-disposed persons in the neighbourhood that letters were for so long entrusted to its care, as it seems far removed from the days of the scarlet funnel which probably now replaces it. I opine that the young gentleman whom we saw a short while ago engaged in bubble-blowing has been entrusted here with the posting of a letter.

31. THE CHILDREN’S MAYPOLE
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mrs. Dobson.
Painted 1886.

May Day still lingers in some parts of the country, for only last year in an out-of-the-way lane in Northamptonshire the writer encountered a band of children decked in flowers, and their best frocks and ribbons, singing an old May ditty. But lovers have long ago ceased to plant trees before their mistresses’ doors, and to dance with them afterwards round the maypole on the village green, which we too are old enough to remember in Leicestershire. The ceremony that Mrs. Allingham’s children are taking a part in was doubtless the recognition by a poet of his illustrious predecessor Spenser’s exhortation:—

Youths folke now flocken in everywhere
To gather May baskets, and smelling briere;
And home they hasten, the postes to dight
With hawthorne buds, and sweet eglantine,
And girlonds of roses, and soppes in wine.

The scene is laid in the woods at Witley.

CHAPTER VI
THE WOODS, THE LANES, AND THE FIELDS

I’ve been dreaming all night, and thinking all day, of the hedgerows of England;
They are in blossom now, and the country is all like a garden;
Thinking of lanes and of fields, and the song of the lark and the linnet.

When Mrs. Allingham finally, I will not say determined to cut herself away from figure painting, but by the influence of her surroundings drifted away from it, she did not, as so many do, become the delineator of a single phase of landscape art. Her journeyings in search of subjects for some years were neither many nor extensive, for a paintress with a family growing up around her has not the same opportunities as a painter. He can leave his incumbrances in charge of his wife, and his work will probably benefit by an occasional flitting from home surroundings. But a mother’s work would not thrive away from her children even if absence was possible, which it probably was not in Mrs. Allingham’s case. Hence we find that the ground she has covered has been almost entirely confined to what are termed the Home Counties, with an occasional diversion to the Isle of Wight, Dorsetshire, Gloucestershire, and Cheshire. In the Home Counties, Surrey and Kent have furnished most of her material, the former naturally being oftenest drawn upon during her life at Witley, and the latter since she lived in London, whither she returned in the year 1888. This inability to roam about whither she chose was doubtless helpful in compelling her to vary her subjects, for she would of necessity have to paint whatever came within her reach. But her energy also had its share, for it enabled her to search the whole countryside wherever she was, and gather in a dozen suitable scenes where another might only discover one.

As evidence of this we may instance the case of the corner of Kent whither she has gone again and again of late, and where in the present year she has still been able to find ample material to her liking. A visit to this somewhat out-of-the-way spot, which lies in Kent in an almost identically similar position to that which Witley does in Surrey, namely, in the extreme south-west corner, shows how she has found material everywhere. In the mile that separates the station from the farmhouse where she encamps, she shows a cottage that she has painted from every side, a brick kiln that she has her eye on, an old yew, and a clump of elms that has been most serviceable. Arriving at the farm-gate she points to the modest floral display in front that has sufficed for “In the Farmhouse Garden” ([Plate 2]), whilst over the way are the buildings of “A Kentish Farmyard” ([Plate 58]). Entering the house the visitor may not be much impressed with the view from her sitting-room window, but under the artist’s hands it has become the silvern sheet of daisies reproduced in [Plate 38]. “On the Pilgrims’ Way” ([Plate 41]) is a field or so away, whilst a short walk up the downs behind the house finds us in the presence of the originals of [Plates 32] and [36]. A drive across the vale and we have Crockham Hill, whence comes [Plate 40], and Ide Hill, [Plate 55].

A ramble round these scenes, whilst a most enjoyable matter to any one born to an appreciation of the country, was in truth not the inspiration that would be imagined to the writer of the text, for he had seen, for instance, the daintily conceived water-colour of “Ox-eye Daisies” ([Plate 38]), painted a year ago, and he arrived at the field to find this year’s crop a failure, and on a day in which the distant woods were hardly visible; the scene of the “Foxgloves” had all the underwood grown up, and only a stray spike suggestive of the glory of past years; gipsy tramps on the road to “berrying” (strawberry gathering) conjured up no visions of the tenant of Mrs. Allingham’s “Spring on the Kentish Downs,” but only a horrible thought of the strawberries defiled by being picked by their hands.

This description of the variety of the artist’s work within a single small area will show that it is somewhat difficult to classify it for consideration. However, one or two arrangements and rearrangements of the drawings which illustrate these phases of the artist’s output seem to bring them best into the following divisions: woods, lanes, and fields; cottages; and gardens. These we shall therefore consider in this and the following chapters, dealing here with the first of them.

Midway in her life at Witley, The Fine Art Society induced Mrs. Allingham to undertake, as the subject for an Exhibition, the portrayal of the countryside under its four seasonal aspects of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. She completed her task, and the result was shown in 1886 in an Exhibition, but a glance at the catalogue shows in which direction her preference lay; for whilst spring and summer between them accounted for more than fifty pictures, only seven answered for autumn, and six, of which one half were interiors, illustrated winter. These proportions may not perhaps have represented the ratio of her affections, but of her physical ability to portray each of the seasons. Autumn leaves and tints no doubt appealed to her artistic eye as much as spring or summer hues, but for some reason, perhaps that of health, illustrations were few and far between of the time of year

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In so selecting she differed from Mr. Ruskin, who has laid it down that “a tree is never meant to be drawn with all its leaves on, any more than a day when its sun is at noon. One draws the day in its morning or eventide, the tree in its spring or autumn dress.” This naturally exaggerated dictum is the contrary of Mrs. Allingham’s practice. She almost invariably waits for the trees until they have completely donned their spring garb, and leaves them ere they doff their summer dress.

The drawings of the woods, lanes, and fields which Mrs. Allingham has selected for illustration here comprise six of spring, three of summer, and two of autumn, winter being unrepresented. They are culled as to seven from Kent, three from Surrey, and a single one from Hertfordshire.

Taking them in their seasonal order we may discuss them as follows:—

32. SPRING ON THE KENTISH DOWNS
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mrs. Beddington.
Painted 1900.

Out of the city, far away
With spring to-day!
Where copses tufted with primrose
Give one repose.
William Allingham.

That the joy of spring is a never-failing subject for poets, any one may see who turns over the pages of the numerous compilations which now treat of Nature. I doubt, however, whether they receive a higher pleasure from it than does the townsman who can only walk afield at rare intervals, and whose first visit to the country each year is taken at Eastertide. He probably has no eye save for the contrasts which he experiences to his daily life, of scene, air, and vitality, but these will certainly infect him with a healthier love of life than is enjoyed by those who live amongst them and see them come and go.

Fortunate is the man who can visit these Kentish downs at a time when the breath of spring is touching everything, when the eastern air makes one appreciate the shelter that the hazel copses fringing their sides afford, an appreciation which is shared by the firs which hug their southern slopes.

It is very early spring in this drawing. The highest trees show no sign of it save at their outermost edges. Hazels alone, and they only in the shelter, have shed their flowery tassels, and assumed a leafage which is still immature in colour. The sprawling trails of the traveller’s joy, which rioted over everything last autumn, are still without any trace of returning vitality.

33. TIG BRIDGE
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. E. S. Curwen.
Painted 1887.

Here the white ray’d anemone is born,
Wood-sorrel, and the varnish’d buttercup;
And primrose in its purfled green swathed up,
Pallid and sweet round every budding thorn.
William Allingham.

This little sequestered bridge would hardly seem to be of sufficient importance to deserve a name, nor for the matter of that the streamlet, the Tigbourne, which runs beneath it, but on the Hindhead slope streams of any size are scarce, and therefore call for notice. Bridges resemble stiles in being enforced loitering places, for whilst there is no effort which compels a halt in crossing bridges, as there is with stiles, there is the sense of mystery which underlies them, and expectancy as to what the water may contain. Especially is this so for youth; and so here we have boy and girl who pause on their way from bluebell gathering, whilst the former makes belief of fishing with the thread of twine which youngsters of his age always find to hand in one or other of their pockets.

34. SPRING IN THE OAKWOOD
From the Water-colour in the possession of the Artist.
Painted 1903.

We have elsewhere remarked on the rare occasions on which Mrs. Allingham utilises sunlight and shadow. Here, however, is one of them, and one which shows that it is from no incapacity to do so, for it is now introduced with a difficult effect, namely, blue flowers under a low raking light. The artist’s eye was doubtless attracted by the unusual visitation of a bright warm sun on a spring day, and determined to perpetuate it.

The wood in which the scene is laid is on the Kentish Downs, where, as the distorted boughs show, the winds are always in evidence.

The juxtaposition of the two primaries, blue and yellow, is always a happy one in nature, but specially is it so when we have such a mass of sapphire blue.

Blue, gentle cousin of the forest green,
Married to green in all the sweetest flowers—
Forget-me-not, the bluebell, and that queen
Of secrecy the violet.

35. THE CUCKOO
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. A. Hugh Thompson.
Painted about 1887.

In a recent “One Man Exhibition” by that refined artist Mr. Eyre Walker, there was a very unusual drawing entitled “Beauty for Ashes.” The entire foreground was occupied with a luxuriant growth of purple willow loosestrife, intermixed with the silvery white balls of down from seeding nipplewort. Standing gaunt from this intermingling, luxuriant crop, were the charred stems of burnt fir trees, whilst the living mass of their fellows formed an agreeable background. The subject must have attracted many travellers on the South-Western Railway as they passed Byfleet; it did so in Mr. Walker’s case to the extent that he stayed his journey and painted it.

In that case this beautiful display had, as the title to the picture hints, arisen from the ashes of a forest. A spark from a train had set fire to the wood, and had apparently destroyed every living thing in its course. But such is Nature that out of death sprang life. So it has been with the coppice here, and in the oakwood scene which preceded it. The cutting down and clearing of the wood has brought sun, air, and rain to the soil, and as a consequence have followed the

Sheets of hyacinth
That seem the heavens upbreaking thro’ the earth.

The drawing takes its name from the cuckoo whose note has arrested the children’s attention.

36. THE OLD YEW TREE
From the Water-colour in the possession of the Artist.
Painted 1903.

The sad yew is seen
Still with the black cloak round his ancient wrongs.
William Allingham.

One of many that are dotted about the southern slopes of the Westerham Downs, and that, not only here but all along the line of the Pilgrims’ Way, are regarded as having their origin in these devotees. The drawing was made in the early part of the present year, when the primroses and violets were out, but before there was anything else, save the blossom of the willow, to show that

The spring comes slowly up this way,
Slowly, slowly!
To give the world high holiday.