Draft:Helen Lavinia Cochrane (Shaw)

Helen Lavinia Cochrane (1868–1946) was a British watercolourist and philanthropist known for an extensive body of work, primarily Mediterranean land- and sea-scapes. Her greatest activity was during the 1920s and 1930s, but work survives from her student years in the 1890s and her final years in London with vivid portrayals of the London Blitz. As a philanthropist, with her husband Percy Cochrane she founded two Military Hospitals during WW1 and developed a villa and neighbouring village in Liguria, Italy.

Biography - Early life
Helen was born in Lennox Cottage on Sion Hill in Bath while her family was in transit from London to Wyke Regis, near Weymouth. Here Helen spent her first 6 or 7 years on the wild Dorset coast before moving to Barton End, near Nailsworth - a tranquil farming district on the south-west edge of the Cotswolds. She was the ninth of twelve surviving children of Henry Shaw and Marion Selby-Hele - he from a family of lawyers, she from a background of the clergy. Many of these children achieved fame and fortune in their various fields.

Helen first attended the parish school at Horsley and then, after the death of her father in 1880 and the family's move to Clifton, to the progressive Clifton High School for Girls. ...

Biography - Art Schools and Marriage
Helen likely began drawing and painting early; most of her early works are of archetypical English rural life and she returned to these subjects throughout her life. Her High School was progressive and liberal and she lived very near the West of England Academy with its excellent Art College. This is a speculative pathway towards her enrolment to the Westminster College of Art. During or after her time there, Helen took time to travel to Munich in 1890 for study under the respected portraitist Franz von Lenbach. In 1891 Helen moves to Liverpool and enrols in the Liverpool School of Art. Now 22 and living independently, she would have been in the circle around her brilliant eldest brother, Hele, then Professor of Engineering at Liverpool. At this time (1892) but in unclear circumstances, Helen meets William Percy Cochrane, heir to one of Britain's more important iron and steel producers who was being groomed (with his brother Cecil) to lead Cochrane & Co into the coming century. They marry in Liverpool on 29 November of 1892 and move to Newcastle-upon-Tyne where Percy has been managing the company's coalmining interests. They live here for less than five years until something very dramatic occurs. In 1897 Percy resigns his position with the family business in favour of his younger brother and effectively leaves the family. There are no children by this stage and the couple relocate to Menton at the very easternmost end of the French Riviera.

Career
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Works

 * Famous work here
 * Another famous work here
 * Another famous work here