Troublemakers and Prophets: Elizabeth Allen and Other Visionary Artists

August 13, 2026

We are hardwired for stories, and boy, has Compton Verney got a great story in its new exhibition, Troublemakers and Prophets: Elizabeth Allen and Other Visionary Artists. The story, however, is hard to piece together, as there is so little information about Elizabeth Allen’s life and art. One of 17 children born in 1883 to an Irish mother and a German father, both tailors, Allen, who had scoliosis and what was then called a club foot, spent a lifetime in pain. Her family considered her behaviour uppity and called her Queen, a name Allen adopted.

When Allen asked her mother, Mary Anne, why she had been born with disabilities, she was told, “It’s the sins of the fathers falling on the children,” a response Allen rejected. Her mother, considering her an atheist, ejected her from the family home at the age of 25. Allen went on to develop her own particular relationship with God.

The Great Swan Song by Elizabeth Allen, shown at Troublemakers and Prophets. Photograph: © Jamie Woodley and Compton Verney

Allen had probably made appliqué pictures from scraps of material in her parents’ workshop using the inlay or intarsia patchwork technique (cutting out shapes from a top layer and placing contrasting fabric underneath the openings so the lower fabric shows through), and she now made a living as a seamstress, being “good at men’s trousers.” Here, the story gets rather patchy. In 1934, she was evicted from a cottage in Suffolk, moving in 1935 to a small, tumbledown, metal shack in the woods near Biggin Hill. She lived in isolation until she met Bridget Poole, a young student at Ravensbourne School of Art, in 1963. Poole, who was doing community work, eventually moved in with Allen, ultimately abandoning art school and being rejected by her family...

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