Olejar Books

Set in unpolluted country, unshaken by motor traffic, Helen Allingham's are the cottages (with plumbing and electricity added) 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-four 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, 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, silver stone. Her paint takes on the texture of thatch, plaster, moss-weathered oak, the cob-walls of Devon, and Cotswold limestone.
It appears, 75 years later, an ideal world, yet by no means an idle one. The women (invariably in sun-bonnets) have time to gossip at the garden gate, but they have babies in their arms, they carry pitchers for laborious visits to the well, clothes-baskets, bundles of firewood. The children (in pinafores and boots) knit, sew or sweep, or feed the hens which in one picture walk undisturbed in a village street.
Complementing Allingham's charming pictures are over 45 black and white illustrations by Sydney R.Jones. These delicate and affectionate drawings adorn Stewart Dick's perceptive description of this vanishing world and bring to life again the villages and countryside of which the people and their homes were such an organic part. His understanding and insight, combined with secure historical perspective, make this book a celebration of a heritage we should not forget: as he himself says, it is through these homes that the deep, main current of English life has flowed.