Victoria Embankment Gardens

The third of Ginner’s pictures of the centre of London, after The Café Royal 1911 (Tate N05050) and Leicester Square 1912 (Brighton Museum and Art Gallery), this work depicts the Houses of Parliament from an unusual viewpoint in Victoria Embankment Gardens. The two highest towers are half-hidden behind foliage: Big Ben on the left and the Victoria Tower, with a flag, on the right. Below them, looking like a crown, is the tower at the north end of Scotland Yard; at the left in a gap between the trees appear two of the smaller turrets of the Palace of Westminster. None of these buildings is painted accurately in detail. In the middle ground, not easily distinguished, is Edgar Boehm’s 1884 full-length statue of William Tyndale (1484–1536, the translator of the New Testament from Greek into English), while in the foreground a woman with a large yellow hat sits on a bench, possibly reading a book. The picture was painted in the early summer and so the buildings are partly concealed and largely upstaged by the patterning of the flower beds, bushes, trees and, behind everything, the clouds. There are no shadows to indicate the time of day, but the clock face of Big Ben might read three o’clock.

The style of this painting, with heavy outlines around islands of green, blue and yellow, was a departure for Ginner, and not repeated so far as is known. He had tried it out for the first time the summer before in France in a small oil sketch, Neuville Lane 1911 (fig.1).1 That landscape mainly shows foliage, with areas of colour separated by thick outlines placed beside each other like pieces of a jigsaw. There is a small building concealed within the foliage, as are the buildings in Victoria Embankment Gardens.

In his appreciation of Harold Gilman, Ginner mentions that they discussed the paintings by Vincent van Gogh they had seen in a private collection in Paris, that of the brothers Josse and Gaston Bernheim.2 The visit was most probably in the early autumn of 1910.3 Admission to the private collection was probably arranged with Félix Fénéon (1861–1944), the critic and dealer who ran Bernheim-Jeune, the contemporary part of the commercial gallery on the Boulevard de la Madeleine. It is evident that Ginner was then already familiar with van Gogh’s painting, and was showing it to Gilman.