This extraordinary, intensely worked watercolour is one of the most atmospheric landscapes by the late nineteenth-century British artist William Fraser Garden. Almost unknown in his own lifetime, Garden produced a sequence of watercolours which are startling for their haunting effect and technical virtuosity. Garden worked slowly and meticulously, producing a relatively small number of beautiful atmospheric watercolours which have long been highly prized by collectors. In the present work, showing a view across the Ouse valley in winter, Garden carefully records the scene with painstaking precision producing a vivid almost photographic treatment of the landscape. As Christopher Newall has observed, Garden’s ‘works of the late 1880s and 1890s are extraordinary in their pellucid quality of light and their exact delineation of architectural and landscape detail.’[1]



[1] Scott Wilcox and Christopher Newall, Victorian Landscape Watercolours, exh. cat., New Haven (Yale Center for British Art), 1992, p.172.

More Information