A Wiltshire Cottage

Widowed at age 41 and feeling financial pressure to support her three young children, Helen Allingham stepped up her output of watercolors, most of which featured rural cottages and gardens. Her watercolors were wildly popular yet also polarizing. Their popularity may have arisen from the nostalgic needs of those departing to to far-flung colonies and to industrializing cities now seeking a sense of home. Some critics found in them relief from modern woes. Others disparaged their sentimental presentation of a vanishing way of life. Tellingly, a 1903 volume of her work was entitled Happy England. This centuries-old, thatched home is identified as being in Wiltshire, a county in southwestern England. The attention to detail seen here is typical of Allingham’s work, as is the avoidance of any sense of squalor or hardship.