Helen Allingham died on 28 September 1926, a century to the day before this essay. She’d already made history in 1890 as the first woman admitted to full membership of the Royal Watercolour Society, but she’s better known for hundreds of paintings of English cottages — thatched roofs, sunflowers, women at cottage gates — made as the real buildings and the rural poverty behind them were being cleared away. The essay reads her idylls against what she left out.