In a Garden at Cookham, by George John Pinwell (1842-1875). Watercolour and gouache on paper. 7 1/2 x 5 5/8 inches (19 x 14.3 cm). Private collection.

This watercolour was exhibited at the Pinwell memorial exhibition at Deschamps' Gallery in 1876, no. 12. Later it was one of fourteen works by Pinwell shown at the winter exhibition of the New Gallery in 1897-98, no. 219. This exhibition was entitled "An Exhibition of Works Ancient and Modern by Artists of the British and Continental Schools" and featured artists who were no longer living. This exhibition also included works by D. G. Rossetti, Frederick Walker, G H. Mason, and Albert Moore. In a Garden at Cookham had initially been owned by one of the Dalziel Brothers, and following that by Harold T. Hartley, so it has a distinguished provenance.

The watercolour shows an elegant upper-class young woman and her daughter standing in a walled garden in front of a redbrick cottage in Cookham, a historic village on the north-eastern edge of Berkshire. The foreground is ablaze with a variety of flowers including poppies, lilies, and irises. The mother wears a simple but elegant lilac-blue day dress and a straw hat, carries a sack in her gloved left hand, and has a basket cradled under her left arm. The young daughter wears a pinafore dress and stands alongside two straw bell-shaped cloches used to protect outdoor plants. In view of their status, however, it is likely the family had one or more gardeners who actually did most of the hard work of maintaining the garden. The background is almost entirely taken up with the structure of the impressive house with no glimpse of the sky. The result is one of the most beautiful and elegant of Pinwell's watercolours. It strongly supports his reputation for "jewel-like' colours.

Christopher Newall felt this work was influenced by Pinwell's illustrations: "The structure of the composition is based on a careful distribution of horizontal and vertical elements, the dense pattern of which extends throughout the pictorial space and provides a matrix into which the figures have been positioned. This quality, seen previously in North's Halsway Court, derived from the illustrator's instinct to extend structural patterns over the entire surface of a composition" (88). In fact the composition of In a Garden at Cookham is indeed reminiscent of one of Pinwell's finest illustrations, The Island Bee, dating from 1865, that was initially reproduced as an illustration to Wayside Posies edited by Robert Buchanan and published by Routledge and Sons in 1867.

Bibliography

Newall, Christopher. Victorian Watercolours, London: Phaidon Press Ltd. 1987.

Williamson, George C. George J. Pinwell and His Works. London: George Bell & Sons, 1900.


Created 14 May 2023