Helen Mary Elizabeth Paterson was born on the 26th September 1848 in the small village of Swadlincote in Derbyshire. She was the eldest of seven siblings. Her father, Alexander Henry Paterson, was a physician, and her mother, Mary Chance (née Herford) was the daughter of a Manchester wine merchant. The artist was still a toddler when the family moved to Altrincham, Cheshire, where her father set up a new practice. It appears that Paterson grew up in a happy household where her interest and talent in art were supported, and she went to a Unitarian girls’ school that her grandmother, the painter Sarah Smith Herford (1791-1831), had founded. Tragedy struck when her father and Helen’s youngest sister died during a diphtheria epidemic in 1862. The widow and remaining siblings thus moved to Birmingham and lived with Paterson’s paternal grandmother and aunts.
Paterson attended the Government School of Design in Birmingham and subsequently enrolled in the Female School of Art in Bloomsbury in 1866. From 1868, she was a student at the Royal Academy Schools. As a young, unmarried woman living alone in London in student accommodation, she was looked after by her aunt, the artist Laura Herford (1831-1870). Philip V. Allingham, contributing editor to The Victorian Web, writes that Paterson even lived with her aunt. Herford had been the first woman to be admitted to the prestigious institution in 1860. After a couple of years, the aspiring artist had become quite disappointed with the teaching and stopped attending regularly. Of all the tutors, Frederick Walker (1840-1875) left the most lasting impression. According to Marcus B. Huish, author of The Happy England of Helen Allingham (1903), whatever the popular Walker taught regarding painting in water-colour was law to his students. As Allingham explained herself: “I was influenced, doubtless, by his work. I adored it, but never consciously copied it.” Other teachers were e.g. Sir Frederick Leighton (1830-1896) and Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896). Briton Rivière (1840-1920), an artist especially known for his animal paintings, became a great friend of Allingham’s during her time at the RA as well.
Because money was tight and she had to support herself and her family, Helen Paterson started working freelance as a black and white illustrator while still a student. From 1868, she worked for Joseph Swain (1820-1909), and Horace Downey Harral (1817-1905) two of the major wood engravers of 19th century Britain. She received commissions for magazines such as Once a Week, Cornhill Magazine and Aunt Judy. For the latter, she illustrated serialised children’s novels by authors such as Juliana Horatia Ewing (1841-1885), who was a prolific and popular writer. Paterson created images, for example, for Ewing’s A Flat Iron for a Farthing (1873) and Six to Sixteen (1872). According to the writer Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), Six to Sixteen was one of his favourite stories. He wrote in his biography Something of Myself (1937):
“There were not many books in that house, but Father and Mother as soon as they heard I could read sent me priceless volumes. One I have still, a bound copy of Aunt Judy’s Magazine of the early ’seventies, in which appeared Mrs. Ewing’s Six to Sixteen. I owe more in circuitous ways to that tale than I can tell. I knew it, as I know it still, almost by heart. Here was a history of real people and real things.”
In 1870, Paterson became the only female staff member at the newly founded weekly periodical The Graphic when they offered her a permanent position. She had been recommended by Swain, who had been impressed by her reliability and excellent drawings.However, she was not only an illustrator at The Graphic, but additionally acted as a reporter on theatre plays, ladies’ fashion, flower shows and other topics deemed suitable for respectable women. Through these assignments, she met another young woman, who would also become a good friend: the actress Ellen Terry (1847-1928). The pay the magazine offered its employees was good enough to even put some money by for a rainy day, which suited the – as yet – unmarried Paterson well. After leaving the Royal Academy Schools in 1872, she enrolled at the Slade School of Art where she met fellow illustrator Kate Greenaway (1846-1901), who – like Rivière and Terry – became a lifelong friend.
One major assignmentwas providing the illustrations for the serialisation of Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd in Cornhill Magazine in 1874. The author had written to the publisher in December 1873: “With regard to the illustrations perhaps I may be allowed to express a hope that the rustics, although quaint, maybe be to appear intelligent, & not boorish at all.” In a further letter, he explained that he had made various sketches of “smockfrocks, sheep-crooks, rickstraddles”, etc. during the previous summer.He offered to send them to whichever illustrator had taken on the job, because he wanted the images to be authentic and thought his drawings might help. He had a great respect for the people in rural areas and their professions and wanted to have their lives represented accordingly. Hardy was delighted with Paterson’s work and wrote in later years that she was “the best illustrator I ever had”. When they met shortly after the first instalments of the novel had been published, he was very taken by her and, in 1906, admitted in a letter that he almost wished that she had married him instead of Irish poet and editor William Allingham (1824-1889).
Allingham, who also worked as an editor for Fraser’s Magazine (until 1879), and Paterson were married in August 1874. The poet had written to the wife of Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) shortly before the wedding: “We have a great many friends in common and trust under Heaven to be in everyway good to each other and to keep our friends.” The couple lived in Trafalgar Square, Chelsea for the first years of their marriage. Allingham was almost twice his wife’s age and had already made some illustrious friends such as Tennyson and writer and philosopher Thomas Carlyle ((1795-1881) in his life. Both became close friends of the new Mrs Allingham, and she created several pictures of each of them, although they both loathed being portrayed. At the 1877 exhibition of the Old Water-Colour Society, in which the artist showed a portrait of Carlyle in his garden, the art critic and writer John Ruskin (1819-1900), who had by then known her husband and Carlyle for years, asked Allingham why she drew the philosopher as a lamb when he should be drawn as a lion. On that, Huish writes, she could comment that she could only depict him as she saw him. According to William Allingham’s diary of 1880, on one occasion Tennyson only agreed quite unwillingly to be drawn in lieu of payment of a landscape drawing that she had made for him. She finally managed to paint a fine portrait of the poet in 1890 at Farringford, his house on the Isle of Wight.
Later works for Far from the Madding Crowd, thus bear her married name. A year later, she illustrated Miss Angel, a story by Anne Isabella, Lady Ritchie (1837-1919) née Thackeray (daughter of writer William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)) for Cornhill Magazine. Those were also some of the first illustrations she signed with her new surname. The novel is about the famous Swiss painter Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807), one of the first female members of the Royal Academy. However, Allingham’s marriage made her less financially dependent on earnings from her black and white work. She therefore resigned from her position at The Graphic in 1874 and pursued her ambition to become a watercolour artist
Allingham had already shown her watercolours as early as 1869 at the Dudley Gallery, London, which boosted her reputation as a skilled artist. She first exhibited with the Royal Academy in 1874 and sold both her entered pictures, The Milkmaid and Wait for Me. The Young Customers, exhibited at the Society of Painters in Watercolour in 1875 was her entry ticket to the society – in a manner so speaking. The idea for this picture had derived from an earlier illustration for A Flat Iron for a Farthing. Ruskin was delighted by the scene and commented that
“[T]he drawing, with whatever temporary purpose executed, is for ever lovely – a thing which I believe Gainsborough would have given one of his own pictures for, old-fashioned as red-tipped daisies are, and more precious than rubies.”
She was subsequently made the first ever full female member in 1890. She would exhibit with them until 1925. At her home in Chelsea, she was inspired by the garden of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, home of the Chelsea Pensioners. The artist had already created some rural scenes during family holidays in Margate or Eastbourne. A stay the picturesque village of Shere in Surrey further encouraged her to paint nature and, increasingly, cottages.
After Carlyle had died in February 1881, the Allinghams decided to relocate to the hamlet of Sandhills near Witley in Surrey. Regular train connections to London made the area a popular spot for well-heeled newcomers, who found the countryside healthier and quainter than the polluted city. Tennyson’s house Aldworth was in the vicinity, which brought them into regular contact with the great poet. Living in Surrey, the artist began in earnest to depict the lovely countryside she was surrounded by and the local cottages. Keen gardener and countryside walker Tennyson and the horticulturist Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) became regular companions. They advised her of paint-worthy cottages, landscape views and on gardening. Her watercolours of local cottages were to become records of a traditional architecture that was on the verge of vanishing forever. The artist was genuinely concerned about this loss and was very conscientious when it came to portraying correct building styles. She painted the individual chimneys, latticed windows and beamed structures of the cottages in detail. However, thatched roofs, like that in The Market Cross, Habbourne (1898), were fire hazards; other dwellings were replaced by more modern homes, such as the house seen in In Witley Village (1884), which was pulled down by its owner only a year after Allingham had painted it.
However, her biographer Ina Taylor explains that, while the painter recreated vernacular architecture meticulously, Allingham didn’t necessarily depict what was in front of her. Some places would be quite run-down and in need of urgent improvements to make their inhabitants life easier. But either money was short, or their landlord was quite fond of a ‘picturesque’, rustic cottage and cared little for his tenants’ comfort. According to Taylor, the artist would ‘restore’ some dwellings to their previous, more traditional style in her pictures, if she had heard that they had, for example, latticed windows or a thatched roof in the past, even if they had been modernised in the meantime. She would also sometimes dress the figures in clothes that were by then already old-fashioned and rarely worn anymore. She created images of sunny, halcyon days with pretty, young women and children (rarely elderly people or men) going about their daily tasks of gathering flowers or hanging the laundry but would ignore the darker side of rural life such as poverty and back-breaking work. A lot of cottagers also planted vegetables in their gardens instead of the pretty flowers that are flourishing in the artist’s images. Rather than locals, she would also often employ models to populate her pictures and had sketchbooks full of figures ready to be copied in later. Unlike Walker and other artists during that time, she stayed well away from social realism; hardship was not one of her topics.
She also took more and more to plein air– painting, just like her former mentor Frederick Walker. She enjoyed experiencing the changing of the seasons and painted in all weathers, although her pictures mainly show spring and summer scenes. The freedom of completely creating her own compositions, was also a luxury which she didn’t have as an illustrator.Although she would still often include people in her images, the figure became less and less important over the years. This can e.g. be observed in and Blackdown from Witley Common (1886) Ox-Eye Daisies, Near Westerham, Kent (1902). In 1886, the Fine Art Society invited her to exhibit her popular cottage depictions; it was her first one-woman show and was aptly called Surrey Cottages. The painter would carry on exhibiting her work at the society until 1913 in addition to showing her work at other shows, too.
Allingham’s children – Gerald Carlyle (1875-1961) and named in honour of their friend), Eva Margaret (b. 1877) and Henry William (1882-1961) became regular models. They are present in pictures such as The Children’s Tea (1882), The Donkey Ride (1880) and The Goat Carriage (1880). They appear in her last black and white illustrations – according to Huish – which the artist created for her husband’s Rhymes for the Young Folk (1885). The book also contains images by Greenaway, the illustrator Harry Furniss (1854-1925) and Allingham’s younger sister and fellow artist Caroline Paterson (1856-1911). Even the poet himself contributed a couple of small sketches. The volume was dedicated to the Allingham children.
The family lived a happy life in Surrey until William Allingham’s health and considerations about their eldest son’s future education required them to return to London in 1888. They moved to Eldon House in leafy Hampstead, just north of the city. Friends such as Kate Greenaway and Brition Rivière lived close by, as did her mother, brother Arthur and sister Carrie. Tragically, the poet died in November 1889, and his widow had to solely rely on her income as an artist yet again. Although she had to look after her three children as well, sheworked hard six days of the week to support them. The family travelled to Ireland to visit the monument that had been erected in honour of William Allingham and see his relatives. On their return to England, the artist employed Miss Sarah Prie, a Scotswoman, to look after the children and household. This enabled her to spend time in Surrey, Sussex and Westerham in Kent; with Lord Tennyson on the Isle of Wight; Pinner in Middlesex with KateGreenaway and other places, where she would paint her still very popular rural life scenes. Closer to home, she would paint cottages and gardens of the Heath.
She sometimes painted portraits and travelled to Venice in 1901 and 1902 to find new subjects that would appeal to buyers. (Her first trip to Italy had been as a student in 1869.) Unfortunately, the subsequent exhibition at the Fine Art Society in 1904 was not a success; people simply preferred her depictions of gardens and the countryside. Her paintings were not only shown in her home country, but also in France, Italy, Russia and Belgium, where she received the medal for watercolour painting at the Brussels International Exposition in 1897. In 1903, she collaborated with art critic Marcus B. Huish on his book The Happy England of Helen Allingham, which included some of the first high-quality colour-reproductions of her works and biographical information. She provided images for Stewart Dick’s book Cottage Homes of England (1909 and illustrated her brother Arthur’s book Homes of Tennyson (1905). In addition, she published editions of her late husband’s diaries (1907) and Letters to William Allingham (1911).
After the First World War, the demand for Allingham’s quaint images waned; they came to be seen as old-fashioned and sentimental. To make up for lost profit, the ageing artist started taking on pupils. None of her by then grown-up children had followed into her footsteps. Her youngest and favourite child, Henry, made a career as an engineer. Her daughter Eva Margaret was – according to Taylor – a slow learner (to quote Taylor: “mentally retarded”) and was committed to an asylum when she was in her twenties. She died after her mother, but quite a few years before her brothers. Helen Allingham herself died in 1926 on a visit in Surrey, at Valewood House, property of her friends, the Mangles. She had been visiting her old home Sandhills and had a walk across the heath, still enjoying considerable health for her age. However, on the 28th September, she died of acute peritonitis. She was cremated at Golders Green in October and a plaque commemorates her at Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel in Hampstead, where her uncle, the Reverend Brooke Herford (1830-1903), had once been minister.
Karen Westendorf (Curatorial Officer)
(Click on images to enlarge them.)
Sources:
Allingham, William et al.”William Allingham, a diary.” Macmillian & Co. Ltd. 1907. Internet Archive. Date of access 19. Jun. 2024. https://archive.org/details/williamallingham00alli/mode/2up
Huish, Marcus B. “The Happy England of Helen Allingham.” Bracken Books. 1985. Internet Archive. Date of access 01 Apr. 2024.
https://archive.org/details/happyenglandofhe0000huis/mode/2up
https://www.helenallingham.com/Helen_Biography.htm
https://www.royalwatercoloursociety.co.uk
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk
https://rowntree.exeter.ac.uk/items/show/2
https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/allingham/13.html
https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/1922_Who%27s_Who_In_Engineering:_Name_A
https://archive.org/details/expositionintern00cong/page/10/mode/thumb?q=Allingham
https://rowntree.exeter.ac.uk/items/show/2
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