The Happy England of Helen Allingham

Bracken Books, London, 1985. Book condition: very good with small amount of shelf wear around th head & tail of the spine. Dust jacket condition: fine and unclipped with light shelf wear. Helen Allingham loved to paint in the open air, in spring and summer. Her trees are usually heavy with leaves, her gardens bright with flowers, her shrubs weighed down with blossom. Many of her cottages are almost hidden beneath overhanging boughs, rambling roses, or creeping plants. Only once (plate 18) in this book does she suggest winter - with bare branches - and even then, the sky is mostly blue. It is never, in her pictures, dark or brooding. No wonder, in such unvaryingly fine weather, that the women wear sunbonnets as they stand at their gates; these are days warm enough for the girls to go out in print dresses and pinafores, and the boys in smocks. Helen Allingham always preferred to paint on the spot; and after she had left Witley in Surrey and moved back to London, where she lived for the rest of her life, she returned every summer, unable to stay away. The result was the beautiful series of water-colours you will find in this book, The Happy England of Helen Allingham has no less than 80 examples of what the Times art critic, writing of 'The Basket Woman' (Plate 48), called 'the very model of what an English water-colour should be'.