Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden, The Queen’s Gallery - exhibition review
If you think Britain’s obsession with gardens is recent, take a look at a 1715 painting of the baroque water cascade in Bushy Park by Marco Ricci’s studio. It marks the future George II’s visit to Lord Halifax’s gardens, and George and his party are grouped at the painting’s right.
They’re drawn in a frankly wobbly style, but no matter, because they are subordinate to the painting’s real subject: the cascade, bathed in a celestial light usually reserved for divine halos. This is garden worship, in an era of heroic landscaping.
This painting may be artistically uneven but it’s historically fascinating, as is true of much else in this gathering of the Royal Collection’s horticulturally themed works. Inevitably, palaces loom large, from Whitehall in 1545, where Henry VIII stands with his son Edward and a long-dead Jane Seymour at his side, gardens watched over by heraldic beasts behind; to Windsor in 1840-45, where Edwin Landseer’s painting captures Victoria and Albert, and their family, with a garden view.
There are also magnificent garden-based things acquired by the royals over the years: jewel-like Persian miniatures, exquisite Leonardo botanical drawings, and a small but stunning early Rembrandt.
The result is an encyclopaedia of gardens and their meaning — as a symbol of faith and power, a theatrical spectacle, a scientific laboratory, a social arena. And despite a fussy display it’s hugely enjoyable, wobbly figures and all.
Until October 11 (020 7766 7301, royalcollection.org.uk)
