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Christopher Wood
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GEORGE SAM ELGOOD (1851-1943)
Roses and Pinks at Levens Hall, Kendal, Cumbria
( United Kingdom
c. 1892
)
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Medium
pencil and watercolour with gum arabic, heightened with bodycolour
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Signed/Inscribed/Dated
signed and dated 1892
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Dimensions
55.00cm wide
37.20cm high
(21.65 inches wide 14.65 inches high)
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Provenance
Christopher Wood Gallery, 1983. Mr and Mrs Rodney Leach. The Hon. Mrs H. Philipps. Mrs John Fairbairn.
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Literature:
Gertrude Jekyll, Some English Gardens, illustrated by G. S. Elgood (1904) illus. p. 65. P. Hobouse and C. Wood, Painted Gardens: English Watercolours 1850-1914 (London, 1995) plate 97
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Exhibition History:
Munich, Neue Pinakothek, and Madrid, The Prado, Victorian Painting, 1993 (exhibition organised by The British Council.)
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Description / Expertise
The garden at Levens Hall in Cumbria was designed for Colonel James Grahme in the last decade of the 17th century by a Frenchman, Guillaume Beaumont. The making of the garden and the park is very well documented with old papers and accounts still in the house. The garden in 1900 and today is divided by yew walks and is roughly how Beaumont planned it, a typical 17th century small manor house garden. The house and the garden are open to the public today, with successive generations maintaining the elaborate topiary for almost three centuries.
Levens is the most famous topiary garden in England and no other garden of its age, except Hampton Court perhaps, has retained so many of the originally planted yews. Levens was a particular favourite garden of Elgood’s and he painted several watercolours of various aspects of the garden. This watercolour shows beds of roses and grey-leaved white-flowering dianthus and delphiniums (a particular favourite of the artist) among the magnificent topiary
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