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Miss Elizabeth Allen – Catalogue Raisonné
Miss Elizabeth Allen – Life & Work, by Hazel Conway
Miss Elizabeth Allen – Exhibitions & Press

Miss Elizabeth Allen – An Introduction
The saying ‘truth is often stranger than fiction‘ is often attributed to Lord Byron or Mark Twain, and it can certainly be applied to the life and art of Miss Elizabeth Allen (1883-1967). What survives from her remarkable life today is a compelling backstory with unexpected success against all odds at literally the 11th hour, and fewer than 150 unique, colourful and highly meaningful and symbolic cut and sewn fabric patchwork artworks – or, at least, records of them.

Early Life
Born in north east London during the late Victorian era, Elizabeth Allen (née Koch) was one of 17 children of a German immigrant tailor and his Irish tailoress wife. Elizabeth had debilitating curvature of the spine and one of her legs was shorter than the other, but she grew to be strong of mind and will. She learned how to sew, becoming part of the family business, and it is here that she is thought to have begun telling stories by making pictures from fabric offcuts left over from the tailoring business – probably whilst everyone else her age enjoyed the life of a child or young person.

But her role in the family business was not to last as she was thrown out of home for her strongly personal religious views. Both her parents died when she was in her 20s, and Elizabeth moved (via working as a tailoress with some of her siblings in north London) to a cottage in Suffolk, from where she was wrongfully evicted and made homeless in 1934. She fled and ended up living alone, effectively an outcast, in a metal shack deep in the woods near Biggin Hill, Sussex.

The Autobirragraphy
Little else is known about her life, apart from that it was filled with cruelty, rejection, deprivation and loss due to her disabilities, unusual lifestyle, and hard-held, hardcore Biblical beliefs which she was never afraid to express. She never married, never had any children, and presumably fell out of touch with her 16 siblings, many of whom may not have lived as long as her. In 1961, she made an autobiography (‘The Autobirragraphy‘, front cover shown below) of her life from cut and sewn fabric which detailed what she wanted to be recorded of it – from her birth to her decision that the world would end in 1996, to the inclusion of dragons, angels, and scenes from her life such as her eviction. At some point, she became known by the nickname ‘Queen’, undoubtedly due to her forename and redoubtable spirit.

The Work
Themes in her art combine deeply religious, often apocalyptic, views from the Old Testament with mythology and mysticism, modern art, and even current affairs heard on the radio. Subjects run from Jonah and Noah’s Ark to The Beatles and the rise of Black equality. At first glance, her work is colourful, quirky and almost child-like, but more is always revealed at a second glance and beyond. Without her to explain, the real meaning of some pictures may only ever be guessed at.

Allen’s textile art has been compared by artists and critics to modern art by the likes of Henri Matisse, Ben Nicholson, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Klee, and they have also drawn strong parallels to Persian and Indian Mohgul miniatures, Etruscan frescoes, a Medieval Book of Hours, and even the Egyptian Book of The Dead. Looking retrospectively today, the life and work of the Kentish tailor George Smart (1774-1846) and the famed naïve artist Grandma Moses (1860-1961) are also both comparable and relevant.

However, what makes her art even more remarkable is that she undoubtedly never saw this art, or indeed any art, having seemingly never visited a museum or art gallery. Nor did she own any art books or publications. These patchwork pictures are entirely her own creation, a tangible visual expression of her deeply held beliefs and thoughts on what was happening in the world outside her shack. Inherent in them is also a strong ‘folk art’ aspect, given who created them and how they were created, although it would be wrong to call her work ‘naïve’ as it was always created with skill, intention, and a desire to tell a story or illustrate beliefs, thoughts or morals.

Discovery & Success
From December 1963, the hermit-like Allen was befriended by a young art student, Bridget Poole, who was studying at a nearby art college in Sussex and began to care for her after taking her a Christmas present. Amazed by the strange old lady and her fabric creations that she found in the metal shack, she told her college teachers in 1965, and they communicated the findings to a group of successful Modern British artists including Patrick Heron, Trevor Bell, and Michael Kidner.

What happened next is nothing short of miraculous. This group of artists recognised her work as of immense interest and importance and propelled it from a unknown shack in the woods into the stratosphere of the art scene of the 1960s. An exhibition at a leading gallery in London in 1966 led to exhibitions of her work across the United Kingdom and then the world, with solo exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles and inclusion in European exhibitions.

Her work received rave reviews from art critics in leading national and international publications at the time, and many sales were made – even to Hollywood film stars. But Elizabeth Allen was never to benefit from this herself, or even witness most of it, as she died in July 1967, roughly 18 months after her first exhibition. The flame of her artwork continued to burn into the early 1970s, but was then extinguished as the insatiable hunger for the new from the art world continued unabated, and her works (limited by her death) disappeared into collections from which they were not to emerge. The medium of textile and the fact that she was a woman artist no doubt also played roles. Since then, for over half a century, both she and her remarkable oeuvre have been almost entirely forgotten – and most of her pictures have been seemingly lost to us.

My Involvement
I came to Elizabeth Allen’s work, and hence her incredible story, in 2018 when I acquired a piece by her at auction (below, Lunar-Ticks Picnic, EA18) that had caught my eye due to its charm and eccentricity – and the interesting label from a notable London gallery on the back. I undertook some reasearch, became smitten, and wrote a blog post in 2021. In early 2024, I was contacted by the art connoisseur and collector Ronnie Duncan, who had, with two interested friends, found and read my blog post. A visit to Duncan’s home in Summer 2024 revealed not only that he had been involved with bringing Allen’s art to the public eye in the mid-1960s, but also that he has a small collection acquired at the time.

After more research and conversing with Duncan and his two friends, Mike Dando & Liz Jones, I decided to compile these pages on her work, which comprise an attempt at a catalogue raisonné of sorts, a list of her exhibitions and highlights from critics’ reviews at the time, and the online publication of an excellent, comprehensive essay written in 2017 by the textile historian Hazel Conway. These pages are very much a work in progress, so please do contact me if you have something relevant to add.

I hope you enjoy Miss Elizabeth Allen’s art, and her story as far as it is told here. But, moreover, I hope that these pages help to ‘flush out’ more of her work that has currently been lost, and also that they enable the art market to identify and sell her work correctly if and when it does reappear.

I would like to thank the following for their help and support: Hazel & Michael Conway, Ronnie Duncan, Mike & Liz Dando, Robin Light of the Crane Kalman Gallery, The British Quilt Study Group, Compton Verney, Bellmans Auctioneers & Valuers, Stair Galleries, Reeman Dansie, and Sammlung Zander.

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Miss Elizabeth Allen – Catalogue Raisonné
Miss Elizabeth Allen – Life & Work, by Hazel Conway
Miss Elizabeth Allen – Exhibitions & Press