KIPLIN Hall is celebrating a year of anniversaries with visitors invited to take a fresh look at watercolour sketches and paintings by the Victorian artist, Lady Waterford, whose talent is largely forgotten today.

The history of the 400-year hall, near Scorton in North Yorkshire, has many stories about the various owners and their extended families.

A new exhibition, Birth, Death & Inheritance: 2018 – A Year of Kiplin Anniversaries, has been mounted to mark significant dates, including the death 200 years ago of Robert Crowe, who owned Kiplin for 36 years, and of Lady Tyrconnel who died at Kiplin 150 years ago in January 1868.

Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford was born 200 years ago in 1818 and was linked to Kiplin through marriage. She exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in London, which was unusual for an aristocratic lady of that period, and moved in artistic circles all her life.

She corresponded with the art critic John Ruskin, knew the Pre-Raphaelite artists – Rossetti called her "a swell and a stunner" – and George Frederic Watts, who designed her grave at Ford in Northumberland, where striking murals by this artist can be seen on the walls of the old public hall.

After her death in 1891, two exhibitions of her work were held in London in 1892 and 1910, with more than 300 pictures in each. There have been very few retrospectives.

During her lifetime, Lady Waterford gave many of her paintings to her Talbot nieces and nephews. They are on display in the Lady Waterford Room and in the exhibition, along with some of her sketchbooks and palette. A terracotta statuette by Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm shows her reading – there is a bronze of it at Woburn Abbey.

Kiplin has more than 50 of her watercolours, mostly sketches, because Louisa was an aunt by marriage of Admiral Carpenter and his Talbot siblings.

Bridget Talbot brought the paintings from the houses of her aunts, uncles and parents when they died. Many have religious subjects or show children at various pursuits. A large watercolour over the fireplace shows Andrew Trotter, son of the head gardener at Ford Castle, in medieval costume with a mandolin.

Kiplin Hall and the exhibition are open until October 31, 11am-5pm. Gardens and tea room are open from 10am-5pm, Saturday to Wednesday.