1 Clayton’s English Female Artists, 1876.

2 In the Exhibition of 1903, 330 out of 1180, or 28 per cent, were ladies.

3 The first female gold medallist was Miss Louisa Starr (now Madame Canziani), and she was followed by Miss Jessie Macgregor, a niece of Alfred Hunt.

4 The Parish Register shows that the plague reached Chalfont later on.

5 See Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham. (London: Fisher Unwin, 1897.)

6 A Flat Iron for a Farthing, or some Passages in the Life of an Only Son, by Juliana Horatia Ewing. (George Bell and Sons.)

7 The model was a Mrs. Stewart, who, with her husband, sat to Mrs. Allingham for years. They were well known in art circles, and had charge of the Hogarth Club, Fitzroy Square, when Mrs. Allingham, before her marriage, lived in Southampton Row close by. She introduced the models to Mr. du Maurier, who immediately engaged them, and continued to use them for many years. “Ponsonby de Tompkins” was Stewart, run to seed, and “Mrs. Ponsonby de Tompkins” a very good portrait of Mrs. Stewart.

8 Lord Tennyson quoted this line to Mrs. Allingham one day when, walking with him, they passed ground covered with the fallen flowers of the lime trees.

9 I have been reminded by the artist that my first introduction to her was at Trafalgar Square, Chelsea, whither I went to see the products of this Shere visit, and that I came away with some of them in my possession.

10 Another tree at Hatfield also claims this distinction.

11 See “In Wormley Wood” (Plate 46), in the description of which I have referred to the reasons for the disappearance of thatch as a roof material. An additional one to those there mentioned is without doubt the risk of fire. Since the introduction of coal, chimneys clog much more readily with soot, and a fire from one of these with its showers of sparks may quickly set ablaze not only the cottage where this happens, but the whole village. That the insurance companies, by their higher premiums for thatch-covered houses, recognise a greater risk, may or may not be proof of greater liability to conflagration, but we certainly nowadays hear of much fewer of those disasters, which even persons now living can remember, whereby whole villages were swept out of existence.

12 Do not these lines rather refer to gorse?

13 Rightly perhaps, for the local doctor pleasantly inquired while she was painting it, why she had selected a house that had had more fever in it than any other in the parish.

14 Mrs. Allingham’s friends sometimes say to her, “You paint so quickly.” Her reply is, “Perhaps I make a quick beginning, but I take a long time to finish.” Which is the fact.

15 When will the day come that editions of the books illustrated by Birket Foster will attain to their proper value? The poets illustrated by miserable process blocks find a sale, whilst these volumes, issued in the middle of the last century, and containing the finest specimens of the wood-cutting art, attract, if we may judge by the second-hand book-sellers’ catalogues, no purchasers even at a sum which is a fraction of their original price.

16 Irish Songs and Poems (1887), p. 47.