ALIPPI-FABRETTI, QUIRINA. Silver medal at Perugia in 1879; honorary member of the Royal Academy in Urbino and of the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia. Born in Urbino, 1849. She was the daughter of the jurisconsult Luigi Alippi. She studied drawing and painting in Rome with Ortis and De Sanctis. Following her father to Perugia in 1874, whither he had been called to the Court of Appeals, she continued her study under Moretti. She married Ferdinando Fabretti in 1877. She made admirable copies of some of the best pictures in Perugia, notably Perugino’s “Presepio” for a church in Mount Lebanon, Syria. She was also commissioned to paint an altar-piece, representing St. Stephen, for the same church. Her interiors are admirable. She exhibited an “Interior of the Great Hall of the Exchange of Perugia” in 1884, at Turin. She painted two interior views of the church of San Giovanni del Cambio in Perugia, and an interior of the vestibule of the Confraternity of St. Francis. Her other works, besides portraits, include an “Odalisk,” an “Old Woman Fortune-teller,” and a “St. Catherine.”
ALLINGHAM, HELEN. Honorable mention at Paris Exhibition, 1900; silver medal from Brussels Exhibition, 1901; bronze medal from the Columbian Exhibition, Chicago. Member of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colors, London. Born near Burton-on-Trent, 1848. Began the study of art at fourteen, in Birmingham School of Art, where she remained about five years, when she entered the schools of the Royal Academy, where instruction is given by the Royal Academicians in turn. In 1868 she went to Italy.
Her first exhibition at the Royal Academy occurred in 1874, under the name Helen Patterson; her pictures were “Wait for Me” and “The Milkmaid.” Since that time Mrs. Allingham has constantly exhibited at the Academy and many other exhibitions.
Her pictures are of genre subjects, chiefly from English rural life and landscapes. She has also been successful as an illustrator for the Graphic, the Cornhill Magazine, and other publications. Her water-color portraits of Carlyle in his later years are well known. She introduced his cat “Tib” into a portrait taken in his Chelsea garden.
Among her most ambitious works are the “Young Customers,” the “Old Men’s Garden, Chelsea Hospital,” the “Lady of the Manor,” “Confidences,” “London Flowers,” and others of kindred motives.
The “Young Customers,” water-color, was exhibited at Paris in 1878. When seen at the Academy in 1875, Ruskin wrote of it: “It happens curiously that the only drawing of which the memory remains with me as a possession out of the Old Water-Color Exhibition of this year—Mrs. Allingham’s ’Young Customers’—should be not only by an accomplished designer of woodcuts, but itself the illustration of a popular story. The drawing with whatever temporary purpose executed, is forever lovely; a thing which I believe Gainsborough would have given one of his own paintings for—old-fashioned as red-tipped dresses are, and more precious than rubies.”—Notes of the Academy, 1875.