Lilias Trotter

A friend posted on Facebook this site about Lilias Trotter.
It is by Miriam Rockness who wrote her biography, A Passion for the Impossible:  The Life of LiliasTrotter. 

Lilias  was an artist who gave her life to missions and sketched & painted 
much of the landscape.


John Ruskin, in his 1883 Oxford lecture, “The Art of England,” tells of meeting a young woman, Lilias Trotter, who challenged his prejudice about artists.  “For a long time I used to say, in all my elementary books, that except in a graceful and minor way, women could not draw or paint.  I’m beginning to bow myself to the much more delightful conviction that no one else can.”  Exhibiting a half-dozen framed pages from her Norwegian sketchbook for his students to copy, Ruskin advised, “You will in examing them, beyond all telling, feel that they are exactly what we should like to be able to do, and in the plainest and frankest manner shew us how to do it – more modestly speaking , how, if heaven help us, it can be done.”. 

"There is a wonderful sense of expansion – endless expansion – about our love for those who are gone, as if it had escaped earthly fettering.  The pain of the parting is just the rending of the sheath, as it were, to let the flower have its way.  And their love for us will have grown in the same way, only in fuller measure, into something pure and fathomless and boundless and inexhaustible because it is “in God.”     26 May 1918