The Cottage Homes of England

Set in unpolluted country, unshaken by motor traffic, Helen Allingham's are the cottages we should all like to own. She painted them in peaceful Edwardian days, in spring and summer, under cloudless skies. Although at this time she lived in London, she could not keep away from the country and particularly the Surrey she once knew and loved. It is significant that the only touches of autumn that appear in the sixty plus superb illustrations occur in the single London scene, a picture of Wyldes Farm near her Hampstead home. Chiefly, her subjects come from southern England - Kent, Surrey, and Sussex are favourite counties - but she did go as far afield as Alderley Edge in Cheshire, and it is in this picture we see the only blackened timbers in the book. Hers is a green world in which everything grows unchecked: trees dwarf the buildings, creepers reach the chimney tops, herbaceous borders flourish. The cottages sink into the landscape, and sometimes hardly a window shows behind the thick hedges. The artist is never without an excuse for colour: lilac, gorse, bluebells, sunflowers, hollyhocks, faded brick, worn tile, and silver stone. Her paint takes on the texture of thatch, plaster, moss, weathered oak, the cob-walls of Devon, and Cotswold limestone. – Print ed.