62 Hamilton Terrace

In Charlotte Halliday’s account of living in the Wood in her childhood, she mentions that the family moved into 62 Hamilton Terrace in 1949 because it had a big studio in the back garden.

Research via the 1901 Census has revealed that there were two unmarried sisters who lived at 62, ( then numbered 24 ) Hamilton Terrace who are described as ‘artist painters’. The younger of the two, Agnes Gardner King was born in 1856 and died in 1929. The family had been in the house since at least 1891 when their then widowed mother, aged 71, was ‘living on her own means’.

Agnes came from a family of artists and became herself a skilled and talented artist. She was mostly self taught in her art but she did attend a winter of courses at the South Kensington School of Art and she studied art whilst staying in Rome with her father (late 1870s, early 1880s). Her diaries are full of her visiting art galleries, museums and churches with her sister Elizabeth and mother. On her travels, she is constantly sketching. Back in the UK, she sets up an art studio with her sister in Camden Street, London and then in 1883 buys a house in Hamilton Terrace and builds a studio there.

Two watercolours by Agnes Gardner King were sold at auction this century -“Tiptoeing thro’ the Tulips”  and  “A Rustic Orpheus”.