Living Gardens

Li Yuan-chia, [no title]  1993

Patrick Heron, Azalea Garden : May 1956  1956

Heron first made his name as a critic but by 1956 was well established as a painter. Inspired by his Cornish garden, Heron painted this picture during a period when he saw himself moving from representational art to abstraction. He recalled: ‘I referred to the series as garden paintings, since they certainly related in my mind to the extraordinary effervescence of flowering azaleas and camellias which was erupting all over the garden’. Though he regarded the formal qualities of a painting as paramount, he also believed in the importance of subject matter.

Gallery label, September 2016

Derek Jarman, Prospect - Archaeology of Soul  1987

Victor Pasmore, The Green Earth  1979–80

According to Pasmore 'This picture is a completely independent abstract painting and not a landscape abstraction. The title was given after it was painted, to form a poetic metaphor.' It develops a theme explored in a series of paintings made between 1968 and 1976, following Pasmore's move to Malta. He turned from relief construction to a more symbolic content, expressed in colour, shape and line. In the earlier of these works, as here, rounded, organic looking abstract motifs appeared to be held in space by dark rod-like forms. Pasmore also links 'The Green Earth' to very early abstracts, like 'Square Motif, Blue and Gold: The Eclipse', also in this gallery: 'it was one of the first to return to my interest in colour.'

Gallery label, September 2004

Paule Vézelay, Garden  1935

Garden 1935 is one of a small group of sculptures in plaster that Vézelay made in 1935 using simple organic forms and incorporating natural objects. The forms of these sculptures were similar to those that she had used in her paintings of the 1930s such as White Shapes in Movement 1930 (Tate L03890), extending these investigations of the relationship of form to space into three dimensions. Garden is constructed from two white biomorphic plaster shapes placed on top of each other, the lower shape closely recalling the central white form in White Shapes in Movement. The upper form in Garden is hollowed out and is shown in contemporary photographs installed in different ways, the central hollow containing sand, plants or seashells, and the lower form either bare or with shells, starfish and pebbles arranged on top of it. This flexibility in the natural objects that might be incorporated into the installation of the sculpture is reflected in the title Jardinière under which it was first exhibited at Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris in 1937, a ‘jardinière’ being an ornamental container in which to display plants. In a list of works compiled by Vézelay, the artist also described it as Table ‘garden’ with sand suggesting its informality in the context of a domestic environment.

Sir George Clausen, My Back Garden  exhibited 1940

Sir William Nicholson, Miss Jekyll’s Gardening Boots  1920

Gertrude Jekyll was a well known garden designer, who often worked in collaboration with the architect Edwin Lutyens. In 1920 she was seventy-six, and quite difficult. It is said that Nicholson painted this picture of her boots while he was waiting the opportunity of a sitting, as she would only allow this in the late afternoon. However, Nicholson enjoyed finding the revelation of character in clothing. He had painted other pictures of shoes, and of a hat.

The painting is dedicated 'For E.L.', and was a gift to Lutyens. Nicholson's portrait of Miss Jekyll is at the National Portrait Gallery.

Gallery label, September 2004

Spencer Gore, The Fig Tree  c.1912

Spencer Gore was drawn to scenes of everyday life in London. Here he shows the fig tree which grew in the garden next to his upstairs flat at Houghton Place, just off Mornington Crescent.

Gore often painted the view through the windows of houses where he lived. He produced a sequence of views of this tree in different seasons, perhaps inspired by Claude Monet’s series of paintings of haystacks, or Rouen Cathedral, under different lighting conditions.

Gallery label, September 2004

Sir Cedric Morris, Bt, Iris Seedlings  1943

Before the Second World War, Morris was a well-known painter and breeder of irises, which he admired for their 'elegance, pride and delicacy'. In 1940 he moved to Benton End in Suffolk, where he cultivated a garden inspired by Claude Monet's at Giverny. He grew about 1,000 new iris seedlings every year.

1943, the year this work was painted, yielded a particularly beautiful crop. The flowers were placed in a Chinese jug and painted quickly so that the picture could be completed before they died. Morris admired Chinese flower painters because they conveyed something of the deeper meaning of plants.

Gallery label, February 2004

Duncan Grant, Garden Path in Spring  1944

Flowers were a major subject in Grant's later work. The garden represented is that at Charleston farmhouse, near Firle in Sussex, which he shared with the painter Vanessa Bell and where he lived and worked from 1916 until his death. Charleston, its interior decorated by Grant and Bell and its garden developed and frequently recorded by them in their paintings, became a meeting place for artists and writers in the Bloomsbury circle. The house and garden have recently been restored and opened to the public.

Gallery label, August 2004

Ethel Sands, Flowers in a Jug  ?1920s

Ethel Sands was born in America, but grew up in Britain. She was wealthy, and owned houses in Chelsea, at Newington near Oxford and at Auppegard in Normandy, where Flowers in a Jug was probably painted. She was encouraged by the painter Walter Sickert (1860-1942), whom she had met first in 1906 when he expressed admiration for a picture she had sent to the Salon d'Automne in Paris and who had pursued her acquaintance. The following year Sickert invited her to join his newly-created Fitzroy Street Group which sought to promote a form of Impressionist naturalism in Britain. In the years 1906 to 1914 Sands was an important literary and artistic patron, and her house was one of the social centres of modern art in London. Sands's own painting was of a mild Anglo-French type comparable with that of her friend Jacques-Emile Blanche (1861-1942), although the late Impressionist control of colour Flowers in a Jug is comparable too with the pictures of Edouard Vuillard (1868-1940). The mantelpiece still life arrangement, and the visual conceit of the reflected image within the painting, are reminiscent of a small number of pictures by Sickert and some members of the Camden Town Group, such as Spencer Gore (1878-1914) with which Sands is likely to have been familiar. Further reading:Wendy Baron, Miss Ethel Sands and her Circle, London, 1977 Robert UpstoneFebruary 2002

Anna Hope Hudson, Chateau d’Auppegard  After 1927

Li Yuan-chia, Untitled  1993

Li Yuan-chia, Untitled  1993

Li Yuan-chia, No Title  1993

Li Yuan-chia, [no title]  1993

Christine Kühlenthal, The Picnic  1913