Lilias Trotter: The Artist
In May, 1879, Ruskin had Trotter come stay with him at his home in the Lake District and told her “she would be the greatest living painter and do things that would be Immortal,” but she had to give up her missionary work and be wholly focused on her art. She had to “give herself up to art.” So Trotter was faced with a choice, continue her missionary work or pursue her art. Trotter wrote about her dilemma in her journal saying, “At first, I could only rush about in the woods all in a dream, and it was like a dream for the first day or two. Since then an almost constant state of suffocation half intoxication so that I can hardly eat or sleep except by trusting the Lord about it.” But after many days of debating her decision, she came to a clear conclusion. “I see clear as daylight now, I cannot give myself to painting in the way he [Ruskin] means and continue to ‘seek first the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness.’”
Trotter chose to submit her life totally and completely to God’s will and became an influential missionary in Algiers as a result. Her art did not suffer for it, on the contrary, it bloomed into something new. According to the Lilias Trotter Legacy, “she read God’s work, seeing lessons in design and processes, that revealed to her the Creator, nourishing her beauty-loving spirit as well as her God-loving soul. Her diaries are filled with paintings of lessons learned from the natural world, and her language is laced with such expressions as ‘The daisies have been reading me a faith lesson,’ ‘The milky-looking glacier torrent spoke with God’s voice’, ‘The snow is speaking.’” Trotter’s love for nature, artistic expression, and God’s word formed a ministry all of it’s own that inspires people to this day. And it most definitely inspired Helen Lemmel.
To learn more about Lilias Trotter and to view or purchase her paintings, please visit the