A Cottage at Chiddingfold, Surrey
Watercolour
1889 (painted)
1889 (painted)
| Artist/Maker | |
| Place of origin |
Helen Allingham is one of the best known Victorian painters in watercolours. She is also one of the most successful British women artists ever. Most of her scenes were painted in the south of England, particularly Surrey, where she lived from 1881. She often emphasised the worn charm of old thatched cottages, broken fences and overgrown gardens. This backward-looking world is peopled almost exclusively by women and children. Allingham was representing rural life for an urban audience who wanted to believe that a place of simple healthy lives, domestic ideals and older, better values still existed. She idealised life in Surrey countryside that, in reality, was all too often a monotonous and careworn experience for agricultural workers and others.
Object details
| Categories | |
| Object type | |
| Title | A Cottage at Chiddingfold, Surrey (popular title) |
| Materials and techniques | Watercolour |
| Brief description | Watercolour, A Cottage at Chiddingfold, Surrey, by Helen Allingham, 1889. |
| Physical description | Watercolour view of a red-brick cottage in Chiddingfold, Surrey, depicted as a rural idyll with blossom trees and green lawns. There is a path leading up to the cottage with a woman holding a bundle of white washing looking over her shoulder towards another woman behind the gate in front of the cottage, who is holding a baby. |
| Dimensions |
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| Style | |
| Credit line | Bequeathed by Henry L. Florence |
| Object history | This watercolour is reproduced in Happy England, as painted by H. Allingham with memoir and descriptions (London, 1903), co-authored by Marcus Huish and Helen Allingham, plate 44 and described on pp. 130-3, where it is dated as 1889. |
| Subjects depicted | |
| Places depicted | |
| Summary | Helen Allingham is one of the best known Victorian painters in watercolours. She is also one of the most successful British women artists ever. Most of her scenes were painted in the south of England, particularly Surrey, where she lived from 1881. She often emphasised the worn charm of old thatched cottages, broken fences and overgrown gardens. This backward-looking world is peopled almost exclusively by women and children. Allingham was representing rural life for an urban audience who wanted to believe that a place of simple healthy lives, domestic ideals and older, better values still existed. She idealised life in Surrey countryside that, in reality, was all too often a monotonous and careworn experience for agricultural workers and others. |
| Bibliographic reference | Allingham, a prolific painter, began her career as an illustrator for The Graphic, and went on to specialise in English cottages and country gardens. Most of her scenes were painted in Surrey where she lived from 1881; she settled in Witley, where Birkett Foster (cat.no.173) was already established and her work can be seen as part of the same tendency to romanticize the rural past. Working in an eighteenth-century pictorial tradition she deliberately sought out picturesque subjects which she 'improved' by emphasizing their dilapidated charm - worn thatch, moss-covered roofs, broken fences, overgrown gardens. This backward-looking world is peopled almost exclusively by women and children whom she dressed in a style that was clearly old-fashioned. Like Birkett Foster she was re-presenting rural life for an urban audience, as a place of simple healthy lives, where older, and better, values still pertained. These cottage scenes, with the women engaged in domestic pursuits - childcare, laundry, feeding poultry - signified social order, a place where the established proprieties of class and gender were still observed. |
| Collection | |
| Accession number | P.20-1917 |
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| Record created | December 15, 1999 |
| Record URL |
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