Cleveland Museum of Art

Trees and Undergrowth

Garden William FraserLinkedCulture matchlcp-e5f7c64be517

Date: 1885
Medium: watercolor with gouache
Culture: England, 19th century
Department: Drawings
Institution: Cleveland Museum of Art
Object ID: 149397

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

William Fraser Garden’s work was based on the rendering of minute detail with painstaking brushwork and handling of color. Here, he describes an insignificant corner of the Bedford landscape: a tangled thicket in which dry grasses and saplings commingle. Bare branches stretch across a bright blue sky, creating a pattern as intricate as a spider’s web. This may have been the drawing that Garden exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1885 with the title Early Spring in the Woods . A pale green haze in the grass, the azure sky, and scattered wildflowers suggest the promise of spring. Although William Fraser Garden received critical recognition for his watercolors early in his career, he lived and worked in relative obscurity and was plagued by financial troubles for most of his life.

View at Cleveland Museum of Art ↗

The authoritative record is held by Cleveland Museum of Art. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.

Get printable QR codes

Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.

Open this page

See at Cleveland Museum of Art

Provenance & credit

As published by the source institution. Coverage varies — not every institution's open-data feed includes ownership history.

Credit line: The A. W. Ellenberger, Sr., Endowment Fund
Provenance: ?-before 1978: (Christopher Wood, London) | 1978: (Shepherd Gallery, New York, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH) | 1978-: Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH