Two Beautiful Garden Paintings

Garden Path in Spring 

Garden Path in Spring was painted by Duncan Grant. Landscapes and flowers were a lifelong passion of Grant's and a central subject-matter in his work. Grant's primary concern in works like Garden Path in Spring was with colour, harmony and unity of design. In addition, while they sought to define a distinctly national style, Grant's treatment of landscape was consistently influenced by the European aesthetics of Post-Impressionism and was strongly anti-nationalist, even when his subject-matter was most conspicuously British.

He spent the majority of the war years in the rural sanctuary of Sussex. Certainly the wider world is not alluded to in Garden Path in Spring, where the intimacy of the domestic garden setting is intensified by the crowded composition. Blocking out the views beyond and even the sky above, the voluminous trees and plants fill the entire canvas, while blossoming branches sweep inwards to form a protective shade. The extent to which Grant's vision in the early 1940s was of an inward-looking, enclosed world is most apparent when the Charleston paintings are compared with his earlier, European, landscapes.

Grant's flower garden was a rare luxury, and in some senses a rejection of the nationalistic language of wartime self-sufficiency, in line with his earlier pacifist response to the First World War. The detached, carefree and luxurious world of Charleston, enjoyed by its inhabitants and visitors, was to appear increasingly out of tune with modern British life, and in the post-war era of austerity and rationing Grant suffered a decline in his reputation. His solo show at the Leicester Galleries in June 1945, in which Garden Path in Spring and other Charleston scenes were exhibited, received a poor critical reception, although it enjoyed some popular success and all of the large canvases sold.

A Garden

A Garden was painted by Albert Moore in 18696. In the late 1860s Moore, like many of his contemporaries, was influenced by Japanese art. He began to produce pictures which were almost entirely without subject, yet decorative and subtly coloured.


Invariably they show women in classical robes, allowing him to concentrate on the colour, texture and movement of draped fabric.The Victorian poet Swinburne said such paintings are the ‘worship of things formally beautiful .... The flower-like device at the bottom of the picture is the symbol Moore used as a signature.