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 years5 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:—