Years ago I was given some paintings by my grandmother, Audrey Heriz-Smith. They were given to her mother and father when her father was the Estate Agent at Heaning in Yorkshire/Lancashire (it used to be in Yorkshire, after county lines were redrawn, it’s now in Lancashire). They were mostly painted by a “Miss A. Peel”. I’ve got close to one hundred of these. They were painted between 1862 and 1897 or so. Nearly all of them are dated, and many of them have comments from a tutor on the back. It seems that she would paint them, and then send them off to be critiqued. Sometimes they seem to have had a showing, where other people in their “Mona (?) Art Society” would vote on the paintings. I thought I’d post one here and continue to do some research. I’ve photographed 61 of them so far.

This painting is dated, “June 1878″ and the comment on the back reads, “There is much attention to nature. A great effort to represent it correctly but harm has been done by the introduction of [illegible] into the foreground grasses which interferes [with] the faithfulness of the drawing generally.”