LONDON.- A beautiful painting by the Victorian watercolourist Helen Allingham entitled By the cottage gate, Mayfield, East Sussex is estimated to sell for £7,000-10,000 in Bonhams 19th Century Pictures auction on 27th January 2011. East Sussex was a county well known to Helen Allingham. Watercolours dating from the late 1870s show her children playing on the beach at Eastbourne or Beachy Head during the family’s summer holidays. She painted the church at Etchingham, sketched in Robertsbridge and painted the countryside around Mayfield. This house, which she painted in the late 1890s, still stands today and has changed little over time. In 1867 Allingham entered the Royal Academy schools, and she provided the illustrations for Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd as well as other books. In 1874 she