Object Details

From:NHerts

Name/TitleHebron, 1895

About this objectThis small watercolour was painted during one of the artist’s trips around Europe and the Middle East with her travelling and life companion Margaret Thomas in 1896.

Henrietta Pilkington (1845-1927) and Margaret Thomas (1842-1929) met in London in the 1870s. The two women became very close, travelling together throughout the 1890s before settling down in a house in Norton in 1911 where they lived until their deaths.

Their bond is memorialised on their shared headstone, where they are buried together. Beneath Henrietta Pilkington’s name it reads ‘The sweetest soul that ever looked with human eyes. Friends for sixty years.’

The city of Hebron illustrated here is in the West Bank, Palestine, and is an important site for Abrahamic religions. It is designated by Christian, Jewish and Islamic authorities as the burial place of Abraham, his son Isaac and Isaac’s son Jacob, the ‘patriarchs’.

The large white building in the centre of the painting is the complex surrounding the Cave of the Patriarchs, ‘in which,’ Margaret Thomas writes in her book Two Years in Palestine and Syria completed during this time with the artist, ‘Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah are buried.’

Thomas dedicates a chapter of this book to the pair’s time in Hebron describing the fashion and behaviours of local people with particular interest. It is clear that Henrietta Pilkington was more taken with the environment and architecture of the city, as demonstrated by this more abstracted, distant landscape painting.

MakerHenrietta M Pilkington

Maker RoleArtist

Date Made1895

Period19th Century (1801-1900)

Medium and MaterialsWatercolour on paper

Inscription and MarksInscription on the bottom left reads: Hebron 1895.
Signed on the reverse: Hebron H.M. Pilkington

Measurements147 mm x 265 mm

Named CollectionLetchworth Museum

Credit LineMargaret Thomas

Object TypePainting

Object number1930.5477.67

Copyright LicenceAll rights reserved