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One of the hallmarks of Lilias (“Lily”) Trotter’s paintings and drawings—a signature of her style—is the way she used white pigment to show the effects of light.
She saw so many variations of white around her in North Africa. The pure white of lilies, clouds, whitewashed walls, and Arab robes. The radiant white of sunlight on snow. The milky white of the glacier, and the pearly white of sand. The limestone cliffs of France disappearing into the distance from the deck of a steamboat. The creamy white of the Muslim minarets, the primroses and the jonquils, and the houses of Algiers.
In 1888, when Lily and her friends had disembarked to begin a new life—a missionary life— there, she wrote, “I shall never forget the loveliness of our first sight out of our port-hole of the Arab town rising tier above tier in a glow of cream colour against the blue-grey western sky, the water glimmering in blue and gold below, and a flock of gulls sailing and wheeling alternately between us and the land.” But forty years later, she would bemoan the changes that French rule and European tourism had wrought:
All that is not European is shrinking apace. Our first sight of the native town, in the latter 'eighties, showed it standing windowless, massed in cream-white against the dead blue of the sky, the breadth and height broken only by a cypress spire here and there. Now it is interlaced by streets of a nondescript type, and the untouched life of the East flickers but in corners.
The Western presence—slowly obscuring the many deep, colorful layers of Algerian history and culture—was making the city less itself. Less beautiful. Less luminous. But these changes weren’t just aesthetic. There was a growing undercurrent of resistance that would, in the decades after Lily died, erupt into a bloody war. Hundreds of thousands of Algerians would die before the nation won its independence from France in 1962.
Though she was keenly aware of the broader tensions shaping the world, her view was still limited. She couldn’t see all the layers of complexity in the Algerians’ political struggle, or the complicated legacy of her own native country’s far-reaching empire. She couldn’t foresee the way that later generations would view Christian missionaries as complicit in British and European colonialism. She did recognize, however—more than most others of her time—that equating Christianity with Western culture was dangerous and destructive to the body of Christ.
Spiritual sight is not omniscience. Imagination is not infallible. We do our best to see clearly with the light we’re given.
And Lily was always looking for the light. She pitied those “doomed to a roof over their heads” instead of the “unhindered glories of sunlight and moonlight” shining through the open Arab courts of houses like the pirate’s-palace-turned-motherhouse of the Algiers Mission Band, Dar Naama. In her artwork, especially those on toned grey or beige paper, her many touches of white—sometimes subtle, sometimes sweeping—recreate the radiance she found everywhere. The wet linens of a washing-woman reflected in the river. Luminous lace head coverings. The glint of an earring. Flower petals and thistle leaves. The glare of the sun on the fields at harvest. The glowing ripples of mountain peaks. Stone and sand and sea. Sometimes she used a dry brush technique—strokes with pigment but little water—creating texture, wisps of clouds, and allowing glints of paper to show through like dappled light. Even in her monochromatic sketches, limiting herself to shades of grey, she is masterful at showing us the world as a dance of shadows and sun.
White isn’t the absence of color; it only looks white to us because it reflects all the colors of light at once. And there are some whites—like mother-of-pearl—that are iridescent, welcoming the whole spectrum to dance within their sheen.
This is something like the nature of a “wise imagination;” it shines because it is reflective. George MacDonald’s son Ronald called his father’s imagination iridescent, giving color to his faith, like a prism through which white light is splintered into “seventy times seven hues of human delight.” The same could be said about Lily.
One afternoon she sat in the prayer room on the upper floor of Dar Naama, gleaning what precious little silence and solitude her busy life allowed her in the swirl of an active household. Suddenly there was a rustling behind her and a soft “‘O Mother Lili” as little fingers pushed a blank piece of paper through the crossbars of the window.
Lily smiled, said nothing, but took the paper and drew on it the outline of a horse. Then she gently nudged it back through the window, her hand grabbed and kissed before the boy scampered away. Later they would huddle over their paints together—two artists with a common childlike soul—like the divine Artist and his little creators-in-training as he welcomes them into the joy of adding their own imperfect brushstrokes to his unfinished masterpiece. ‘Help me to paint well today, I didn’t paint well yesterday,” the boy would pray that night.
What else is prayer but a bare white canvas we offer to God—a quiet heart full of possibility, waiting for him to show us the shapes and the colors of the life we’re meant to live?
Lilias Trotter was neither a pirate nor a saint—except in the sense that we are all saints in the family of Christ—and she was, by all accounts, a fascinating dinner companion. Human, not flawless. Time-bound, anchored to her own culture and historical period in ways that both informed and limited her perspective on the world—as we all are. But she had an iridescence to her, like the pearly shells she loved along the beach, reflecting the light in her own particular way.
And so, perhaps without even knowing it, she made artists of those around her. They forever saw the world differently because they had known the wideness and lavishness of Lily’s love.
Excerpt adapted from “If Only We Could See,” released by B&H Publishing, April 14, 2026.
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