HELEN ALLINGHAM

Post 181 -by Gautam Shah

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SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture

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Helen Allingham (1848-1926 -née Paterson) was a Victoria era, English illustrator, watercolourist and portrait artist. She was first an illustrator, but after her marriage, she turned to watercolour painting.

She started to paint the English countryside, particularly the picturesque farmhouses and cottages of Surrey and Sussex. She also painted in other parts of the country, like Middlesex, Kent, the Isle of Wight and the West Country, and abroad in Venice, Italy.

She produced rustic countryside scenes with cottages and village people, ‘in a sympathetic style avoiding overt sentimentality’. She became famous for these.

Helen was surrounded by many trends of Modernism in Art, but she continued to draw in her conservative manner, often criticized, for being, ‘overly sentimental’.

‘She used nine colours only, five of which were yellows. Her palette consisted of cobalt, rose madder, aureolin, yellow ochre, raw sienna, sepia, permanent yellow, light red and orange cadmium’.

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ERNST FERDINAND OEHME

Post 180 -by Gautam Shah 

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Sunday Feature on ART of Architecture

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Ernst Ferdinand Oehme (1797-1855) was a Dresden born German Painter. He joined Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1819. He became familiar with the countryside of Saxon Switzerland, and practiced landscape painting, which later became known as plein-air painting.

In 1821, at the age of 24, he first submitted ‘Cathedral in winter’ for an exhibition. His early works reflect sombre tones and 'Gothic' like settings. He travelled in Italy, and upon his return in 1825, he visited the Alps, painted it in water colours.

Oehme was a romantic painter who specialized in moody landscapes with architectural elements. His early works were realistic, full of emotional content and not charged with symbolism. But by 1830s, he had begun to draw naturalistic subjects.

Oehme favoured pure colours, as to be the reflection of, a ‘limitless, divine illumination of the universe’. 

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