- Item
- 1829- 1895
Part of Kidman family fonds
This item is a scrapbook primarily consisting of art created by the Kidman family. The artwork includes pencil drawings, ink drawings, and watercolour paintings with many different subjects: portraits, animals, plants, and a variety of fantasy scenes (including Ella Kidman’s ink illustration of the witches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Some of the scrapbook’s contents capture different elements of the Kidman family’s history. One page features a pasted-in ink sketch (1867) by Henry Kidman, depicting Porters End Farm in Kimpton, Hertfordshire—the estate where he lived and worked in the 1850s and 1860s before getting married and having children. Another page includes a pasted-in letter addressed: “To Mary Ann Elliot Lines, the evening before her marriage April 29th 1829.” Lines was Henry Kidman’s mother, and the letter was written by Jane Kingston, Henry Kidman’s grandmother. Other notable features of the scrapbook are four cut-out, decorative address sections of envelopes, addressed to “Miss Kidman, Bateman House, Bateman Street.” These envelope cut-outs are likely from letters sent by Ella Kidman to Lilian Kidman. The scrapbook also contains greeting cards and a variety of loose leaf paintings and drawings.