Blooming Britain
Andrew Lambirth
Art of the Garden Tate Britain, until 30 August, sponsored by Ernst & Young Home and Garden: Domestic Spaces in Paintings from 1830 to 1914 Geffiye Museum, Kingsiand Road, London E2, until 18 JO;
Ashort personal preamble, if my readers will permit. I was fortunate to grow up in well-tended spacious gardens, for both my parents loved to spend time planting and weeding and redesigning the land that separated and protected our home from others. I helped them, sporadi cally, often for pocket-money, and even worked for a short while as a freelance gardener, but beautifying other people's plots proved not to be a great satisfaction. More recently I have had the charge of a small garden in the West Country. It has given me the greatest pleasure to tend and watch a patch of England as it budded and burgeoned. Beyond this garden are allotments: many of them tremendously productive of flowers and veg. I feel connected with the land in a way I haven't for years. Now I pine for a garden on the large scale — orchard, vegetable garden, Lime Walk, heather maze and flower-bordered lawns — but would I have the time to look after it? Probably not, This year has been designated the 'Year of Gardening' by the Royal Horticultural Society to mark its bicentenary. To coincide, the Tate has mounted an ambitious exhibition entitled Art of the Garden, which examines the relationship between Britain's gardens and her artists during the last 200 years or so. More than a hundred exhibits have been gathered in the inappropriately subterranean Linbury Galleries to celebrate what T. E. Brown so famously called 'a lovesome thing, God wot!' Divided into five sections, ranging from
'Thresholds and Prospects' to 'Representing and Intervening', via The Secret Garden', 'Fragments and Inscriptions' and 'Coloured Grounds', the exhibition takes rather too broad a view, and is just a little bit too portentous at the expense of the gardens and the art, That said, there are some beautiful and unusual exhibits here and, if the classification can be taken with a pinch of salt, there is much to be enjoyed.
Certainly it starts well, with two splendid Constables of his father's vegetable and flower gardens, dating to L815, representing (among other things) a prospect now much changed, painted from a house that no longer exists. In this first section are three Spencer Gores, including the Tate's own excellent 'From a Window in Cambrian Road, Richmond' (1913), a powerful view of Hampstead Garden Suburb from William Ratcliffe, and a number of works by lesser-known painters such as Harry Epworth Allen, Charles Mahoney and Harry Bush. The question of social history versus good painting soon arises here. For instance, Adrian Allinson's 'The AFS (Auxiliary Fire Service) Dig for Victory in St James's Square' (c.1942), is badly painted (just look at the eat), but is at the same time wonderfully atmospheric and informative. A sub-section devoted to cabbages could have proved useful to the exhibition, they feature so frequently, and rarely to better effect than in Cedric Morris's 'Wartime Garden' (c.1944).
Among the good stuff by Stanley Spencer and Albert Moore, there is a great deal I could have done without: Edward Atkinson Hornel for a start, and the anachronistic John Shelley, not to mention the finicky John Pearce. Also the whole of the last room, bar the Wellington boot. The woozly wizzly flute music percolating the galleries from Ian Hamilton Finlay's undistinguished installation might have been better confined to headphones. There are too many indifferent photos of gardens, and even a distinguished photographer like Paul Nash is not well-represented. Howard Sooley's photos of Derek Jarman's Dungeness garden, however, are immensely evocative, and the section on artists' gardens (in the catalogue) is fascinating. In the body of the show it's good to see things by Beatrix Potter alongside Samuel Palmer and Eric Ravilious, also one of Ivor Abrahams's metal shrub sculptures and William Nicholson's portrait of Gertrude Jekyll's boots. But will the exhibition's 'argument' — for the garden as an emblem of national and cultural identity — exert much effect on Blair's Britain? As Dorothy Parker once observed (wasn't she addressing the RHS?): You can take a whore to culture but you can't make her drink.' Admission is £9.50, which seems rather a lot, while the violently overdesigned catalogue costs £29.99 in paperback, By contrast, at the Geffrye Museum is a delightful small exhibition, of some 48 pictures, dealing with much the same subject — interiors and exteriors, The museum itself is well-known for its range of representative urban middle-class interiors, from 1600 to today, presented as 'a walk though history', in picturesque 18th-century almshouses once belonging to the Ironmongers' Company. A new wing with space for temporary exhibitions has recently been added, and it is here that Home and Garden may be seen. The exhibition examines middle-class identity and taste through some odd but eloquent pictures, such as the two by George Elgar Hicks — the one of a 'Wedding Breakfast' much more powerful than 'Changing Homes' hanging next to it. There's a dark Sickert interior, rather difficult to see, and an impressive Solomon J. Solomon 'Conversation Piece' (note the novelty owl lampshade). A Tissot borrowed from Sheffield features the same melancholy yellowing horse-chestnut leaves we saw at the Tate, though deployed to better and less-cluttered effect, but the Atkinson Grimshaw of the artist's garden at Knostrop Hall, Leeds, is not so fine as the Tate's example.
A couple of Spencer Gores continue to emphasise the territory shared by these two exhibitions. If you're interested in the subject of gardens in art, the Tate is an obvious port of call, but the Geffrye's show — which, incidentally, is free, as is the museum — is also worth a visit. It's a good place for tea and a wander in their historical gardens on a summer afternoon after you've looked at the art.
Previous page
