Denis Eden

[7] A correspondent writing in The Times about Stephens in 1959 reflected that most of the boys had no idea of the importance of 'the slightly eccentric elderly man' in relation to the art world and 'if we had been told of it we should have been unimpressed.

[15] Slade alumni such as Augustus John, William Orpen and Wyndham Lewis 'always kept their eyes on what was being done in Paris',[16] and would exhibit with the New English Art Club in preference to the Royal Academy.

However, Eden, Cadogan Cowper and another Royal Academy student, Campbell Lindsay Smith, shunned this emerging modernism and were enthralled by the now unfashionable Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

An 1899 letter from Cadogan Cowper to his mother reveals a certain gaucheness in the young twenty-somethings as they visited Eden's drawing master, F. G. Stephens: '[He] was not there, but his "stunning" wife was.

[18] The young artists shared their techniques: '[Cadogan Cowper] has completed a small self-portrait using Eden's method and thinks it his best work, he has confidence in his painting for the first time.

[20] A portrait of Denis Eden by Wolfram Onslow-Ford (1879–1956) – another young neo-Pre-Raphaelite artist, also from the Royal Academy Schools – was exhibited and favourably reviewed in the Daily Telegraph that year.

Robinson Crusoe was hung at a disadvantageous height on the gallery wall: 'As far as one could tell Mr. Eden had grappled with a curious and difficult effect of lighting, in which he had by no means failed.

[31] She won the Vice-Chancellor's Prize for English verse in 1904,[32] and progressed to study painting at the Women's Department of King's College London – based at Kensington Square[33] – where the artist Byam Shaw had just started teaching.

The painting shows Peire studying a mouse resting on his hand,[40] and a similar light-hearted meditation on man's relationship to animals would be a major theme of Helen Parry Eden's poems in a both playful but simultaneously religious way.

[41] The couple were married on 10 July 1907 at St Saviour's Church, Hampstead,[42] and moved from London to Saffron Walden, where a daughter, Hilary Joan Eden, was born in October 1908.

The Times reviewed the latter with mixed feelings: A pleasing variation on the general work of the exhibition is the 'Green Felicity' (418) of Mr. Denis Eden, one of the few young painters who follow the Pre-Raphaelite tradition.

We will not venture to guess what it means or what the man and the strange witch-like woman are doing; but the picture is something more than quaint; it is painted with the curious daintiness of touch rare among painters today.

[48]Eden's friend Frank Cadogan Cowper, along with the artist Ernest Board, had been working as a studio assistant on mural projects for Edwin Austin Abbey, such as the monumental canvas The Coronation of King Edward VII, now in the Royal Collection.

In order to create stylistic unity, Abbey chose six young artists working in a 'neo-Pre-Raphaelite' mode, and further unifying aspects in relation to colour and scale were imposed on them.

Salisbury had just finished the mural decorations with Abbey at the Royal Exchange, London, and Payne was a Birmingham artist who worked primarily in large-scale stained glass.

[50] An article in The Times explained that 'The process adopted is not that of fresco proper … but one more suited to the London air – that known as marophlage [or marouflage], in which the paint is laid on canvas, which is afterwards fastened to the wall.

'[51] Eden's allocated subject, John Cabot and His Sons Receive the Charter from Henry VII to Sail in Search of New Lands, 1496, celebrates Tudor global dominance at sea.

[55] This portrait of the artist's wife nonetheless makes playful reference to Northern Renaissance portraiture – with a shallow pictorial space and being crammed with potentially symbolic artefacts.

[60] Rural Michelmersh is lovingly captured in Helen Eden's poems of the time;[61] however, after she again became pregnant the family briefly moved back to London in the following year – to an upstairs flat in Battersea.

[72] The First World War began in July 1914, and by the time of the following year's Royal Academy summer exhibition the Edens had purchased a property in the Cotswolds: Waterfall House in the medieval town of Burford, Oxfordshire.

[75] A third child, Mary Simonetta Parry Eden, was born in May 1916, and three works were selected for the Royal Academy that year: The Boy in Brown; Holland, Betsey-Jane and Anthony.

[82] A String of Sapphires – Being Mysteries of the Life and Death of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Put into English Verse for the Young and Simple was a more substantial book, of 173 pages, published in January 1920.

[48] The punningly titled Souvenir d' Hélène – another flower picture[84] – in 1919 was followed by The Bowl of Lemons in 1920, in which Eden showed an ongoing referencing of Northern Renaissance still-life painting, including the placing of his a signature on a trompe l'œil 'label'.

The arched top of the frame was a device often used by the Pre-Raphaelites to reference early Renaissance art, and the work is clearly an allegory on the transience of man: 'A gnarled and ancient tree, disfigured with gargoyles of anthropomorphic knots, grows seamlessly out of the rock with a new sapling beyond.

She was now established as an academic and literary critic, writing in the highly esteemed Dublin Review, for example,[88] and regularly contributing to Blackfriars, a magazine founded in 1920 as a focus of Catholic Christian reflection on current events.

[89] A profile article on her by Katherine Brégy in Catholic World[90] described her as a 'Modern Medievalist': 'When the Oxford anchorite is not speaking in poetry, she divides her pen between sprightly book-reviews for Punch … and a series of medieval prose legends contributed to other magazines.

Vicenza inspired two paintings chosen for the Royal Academy in 1924 – Tempo di Siesta and In the City of Palladio – and probably also the street scenes of 'Caper' that, when populated with little bears ('Ursors'), formed the basis of his book A Guide to Caper the following year.

[94] Eden's imaginatively embellished drawings of Vicenza – fictionalised as 'Caper' and populated with bears – were the basis of a collaboration with Thomas Bodkin, lawyer, art critic, director of the National Gallery of Ireland and family friend,[95] who provided the text.

[110] In the Catholic newspaper The Tablet, Father Illtud Evans, O.P., wrote, 'The last ten years of her life had been for Helen Parry Eden, who died on December 19, a time of constant pain and loneliness.

[114] In the 1939 England and Wales register his occupation is recorded as ‘Economist & Thread Sales Organisation’; he was living at Palace Court, Paddington, with a housekeeper; his wife (b.