drawing
- Museum number
- 1967,1014.34
- Description
-
Cowdray Cottage; thatched cottage with lead windows, seen behind wall topped with hedge, steps leading up to open gateway with a woman leaning against it, road with grassy verge in foreground, woman carrying a bucket on it at r, trees in background
Watercolour, with some scratching out
- Production date
- 1848-1926
- Dimensions
-
Height: 345 millimetres
-
Width: 388 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Label attached to back of mount with details of saleroom. In 2002 the address of this cottage was Manor Cottage, Petersfield Road, Midhurst, West Sussex, Gu29 9RL.
See Annabel Watts, 'Helen Allingham's Cottage Homes - Revisited',1994, where she notes that 'This house was part of the Woolbeding Estate during the 19th century when it was occupied by two families named Palmer and Edwards. It was one of the few buildings in the area to have retained its thatched roof and caught the attention of several notable artists including Arthur Claude Strachan and A R Quinton'. (p. 69)
The following label was written by Kim Sloan for Places of the Mind, 2017:
In the second half of the 1800s, there was a growing concern that England’s picturesque countryside and traditional rural lifestyle were disappearing. Helen Allingham, the first female artist to be elected to the Royal Watercolour Society, set out to record the cottages, gardens and people of the villages of West Sussex and Surrey near her home in Haslemere. But these meticulously painted watercolours so loved by the urban middle classes were ‘sugar coated’ views of the life of the rural poor, where damp and crumbing cottages like Cowdray were shared by two large households of labourers.
For further information see Anna Gruetzner Robins, ''South Country' and other imagined places', in Kim Sloan (ed.), Places of the Mind: British watercolour landscapes 1850-1950, London, 2017, pp. 92-117.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1948 Dec, Fine Art Society
1994 Sep-Oct, Haselmere Education Museum, Allingham's Traditional Cottage (no cat.)
2017 23 Feb-27 Aug, London, BM, G90, Places of the Mind: British Landscape watercolours 1850-1950
- Acquisition date
- 1967
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1967,1014.34
