Monday 4 July 2016

Burgh House & Hampstead Museum - Helen Allingham: Beyond Watercolour Gardens

Beyond Watercolour Gardens: Helen Allingham Revisited

 

Late viewing Tuesday 5 July, 6:30-9pm FREE


Please join us on Tuesday evening to celebrate the opening of our new exhibition- Beyond Watercolour Gardens: Helen Allingham Revisited, which will run until Sunday 9 October.


Enjoy insights into the exhibition from from Burgh House Curator Beccy Lodge and guest curator Rea Stravropoulos, floral inspired gin coctails, homemade lemonade and soft drinks in watercolour hues and William Morris inspired colouring.

Burgh House has one of the most extensive public collections of art by Helen Allingham, and it will be shown in its entirety in this temporary exhibition, co-curated by artist Rea Stavropoulos. The exhibition reexamines Allingham’s work with a contemporary slant, looking past the exquisite watercolour gardens for which she is widely known, to the life of the artist herself; her marriage, her friends and the evolution of her artistic career.

Helen Allingham R.W.S. (nee Paterson, 1848-1926) was a watercolourist who made a career as an artist by teaching, as a freelance illustrator and then by working as a staff illustrator for The Graphic magazine, established in 1870 as a rival paper to the Illustrated London News.

Allingham moved in the same circles as critic John Ruskin, and was good friends with fellow artists Briton Riviere and Kate Greenaway, whom she met at the Slade School of Art in 1872. She married writer, poet and editor William Allingham in 1874, and he introduced her to his circle of friends, which included the Tennysons, the Carlyles, Browning and Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Rossetti.

In 1890, when the ban on female members was lifted, Allingham became the first fully elected woman in the Royal Watercolour Society’s history. Providing a fresh view of this prolific Victorian watercolourist’s output and influences, Rea Stavropoulos’s written and artistic responses to Allingham’s work will also present a view on what it means to be a professional female artist.