watercolours from the Grand Tour and from localities around Britain, Venice featured stongly from the beginning. The original sixty or so members were predominantly female relatives of the clergy, titled ladies or gentlemen of leisure, but this did not mean an absence of good standards or serious intent. Indeed their desire to improve was shown by the fact that a professional artist would be invited to criticise a selection of the works on display, and some did this with a forensic and often comical attention to detail.

Early History

The Lincolnshire Artists' Society, founded in 1906 as the Lincolnshire Drawing Club, celebrates its Centenary this year. Inspired by the Cambridge Drawing Society founded in 1882, it was followed by the St Ives Society in 1927.

Primarily an exhibiting society welcoming artists from all over the county, the L.A.S. started out with an Annual Exhibition in the loose boxes of the stables at Monks Manor, Lincoln, the home of it's founder Miss Elsie Ruston and her art collecting industrialist father Joseph. It moved to the city's Exchange Arcade in 1910 following interest from the press and public, then to a room in the new Central library eventually finding its ideal home in the Usher Gallery from 1927. A great surviver, it emerged from an enforced period of inactivity in the First World War and has since had an unbroken run of exhibitions in Lincoln and around the county ever since.

At first, the emphasis was on drawings and