art | style
The Island of the Greats Helen Allingham RWS
‘A Cottage at Newchurch’. Watercolour. c1889. Image: Courtesy Sotheby’s. Private Collection.
‘Hooke Hill Farmhouse, Freshwater’. Watercolour. 1891. Image: Private Collection.
Very few female artists achieved significant commercial success in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as painting was not regarded as a suitable career for young ladies. Instead ladies were encouraged to draw and paint in the confines of their own homes or gardens. However, there were a few exceptions.
Introduced by Robin McInnes O
n the Isle of Wight Harriet Gouldsmith painted fine, large oils of Ventnor Mill, and fishing scenes set against the backdrop of the Undercliff coast, which she exhibited successfully at the Royal Academy in the 1820s, whilst nearby, at Niton, Lady Gordon received
tuition from J.M.W Turner and others and she produced delicate watercolour drawings as well as pottery designs for Josiah Wedgewood. Later, Beatrice Parsons painted beautiful garden scenes with magnificent herbaceous borders at Bembridge in the East Wight.
Helen Allingham, however, was the exception and she was the most prolific female painter of scenes on the Island in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She became the first female artist to be accepted at the Royal Academy Schools and was the first female exhibitor at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours. At the age of twenty-two she was employed by The Graphic magazine as an illustrator and later she worked for the Cornhill, another very popular Victorian journal.
In 1874 Helen Paterson met and married the Irish poet William Allingham, and through him she was drawn into a literary and artistic circle, which included Browning, Carlyle, Rosetti, Ruskin and Alfred Lord Tennyson. William and Helen made frequent visits to Farringford and whilst on the Island Helen noted that, like her native Surrey, many of the historic old farmhouses and cottages were in a very dilapidated state and some were being demolished. As a result she decided to record these old buildings in their landscape settings in watercolour; this she achieved in remarkable detail. A friend living nearby to her home in Surrey was the celebrated horticulturalist Gertrude Jekyll who provided advice on the accuracy of her painting of the flowers, which filled the gardens of her cottage scenes.
In 1875 Helen was elected Associate of the Royal Watercolour Society, becoming a full member when ladies were admitted in 1890. After the deaths of her husband and Alfred Lord Tennyson,
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