This week of Posts about Helen Sutherland was prompted by seeing several paintings by members of the Ashington Group, often known as 'the Pitmen Painters', in the current (free) exhibition Lives Less Ordinary at Two Temple Place. The group, the majority of whom were mine workers, began painting in 1934 as part of a WEA art appreciation course. Ashington is not far from Rock Hall, and Helen Sutherland was immensely supportive of the men, bought their paintings, showed them her collection, and paid for them all to make a trip to London to visit galleries. This is Pigeon Crees (c1938, Woodhorn Museum) by Jimmy Floyd (1898-1974 74). 

Helen Sutherland collected art (and artists) according to her own tastes and nobody else's, something which, according to her friend Edward Hodgkin, prompted comments about the 'folly of letting an unmarried woman loose with a lot of money'. She met Winifred and Ben Nicholson in 1925 and eventually owned forty-seven works by Ben at a time when, as Hodgkin said, it required 'courage as well as taste' to collect pieces by 'young artists who were known to a few and admired by even fewer'. This is 1932 (crowned head: the queen) by Ben Nicholson which is in Abbot Hall, gifted by Helen Sutherland in 1965.

Helen Sutherland kept a record of the wine and plants she bought, but not of the paintings in her collection which was broken up after her death. As a result, it is difficult to know exactly what she owned. One of the artists she helped (whose work she did buy) was David Jones (1895-1974), also a modernist poet admired by WH Auden and TS Eliot. This is The Chapel in the Park 1932, Tate) with a view from the room that Helen Sutherland gave him, one of his delicate , ethereal and complex watercolours. More examples of this overlooked artist's work can be seen in Kettle's Yard.

This week on the Post, we have Helen Sutherland (1881-1965) who has been described variously as an 'isolated, austere, and fastidious heiress' and a 'patron, socialite, and connoisseur'. She was all of these, and is chiefly remembered for using her wealth to support many emerging, often Modernist, artists and writers. During the 1930s she leased Rock Hall near Alnwick in Northumberland as a place for them to gather and stay. While the art establishment was reluctant to engage with modern art and its creators, Sutherland bought art no one else was buying and built an important collection. 

The last David Austin rose this week is Rosa 'Bathsheba, a lovely mix of apricot pink and pale yellow with a rich fragrance. David Austin has a number of 'literary roses', including several named after characters in Thomas Hardy's novels. Bathsheba Everdene - played by a luminous Julie Christie in the 1967 film - appears in Far From the Madding Crowd. 

William Nicholson painted this portrait ((1920, NPG) of Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) (1920, NPG) and he also painted her famous shoes in Miss Jekyll's Gardening Boots (1920, Tate). Gertrude Jekyll gardened, designed, worked in partnership with Edwin Lutyens, and wrote many still-influential books. In Roses for English Gardens (1902, reprinted 1982) she explains her colourful, painterly approach and advocates putting roses in loose, natural, mixed borders instead of formal rose gardens. 

Rosa Gertrude Jekyll is understandably one of the best-known and most popular of the David Austin roses; it has a beautiful shape and colour, a wonderful fragrance, is easy to grow and very reliable. It was introduced in 1986, and is named after one of the renowned English designer who created or advised on more than 400 gardens (and was the sister-in-law of Agnes Jekyll).