William Fraser Garden ( 1856-1921)
Brittens Farm, on the Ouse, Hemingford Grey
10 x 14cm (approx 3.90 x 5.46in)
signed lower right on the bank "W F Garden '97"
watercolour;
Good condition; in a gilded Frame.
Provenance: The Broderick Family Collection, Lytham, St Anne, Lancs.
LITERATURE:
Bridget Flanagan "Artists along the Ouse", Cambridge 2010
The watercolour shows a view looking west from the river bank at a spot near the delightful village of Hemingford Grey, Cambridgeshire, where Brittens Farm stood.
Garden William Fraser was born at Chatham in Kent. However the Frasers, who were a Scottish family and keen Jacobite supporters, settled in Bedford, where the seven boys of the family could be educated at Bedford School. Garden, who had been given his grandmother's maiden name, changed his name to William Fraser Garden to distinguish himself from his brothers, six of whom also became artists.
Garden settled at the House of the Fields near Hemingford Abbots, Huntingdonshire until 1898, while his parents were living at the Old Manor House, Hemingford Grey. Later he lived at the Ferry Boat Inn, Holywell, Huntingdonshire and although he travelled throughout Great Britain and Ireland the majority of his watercolours are of the fen villages near his home on the Ouse.
Fraser Garden's watercolours are a prime example of the late nineteenth-century revival of painstakingly rendered realism. His work is almost photographic in detail with crisp and detailed colouring and his landscapes have an immediately recognizable clarity.
His work was exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, London.
A view of Hemingford Grey , Huntingdonshire by Fraser Garden was sold at Christie's, London, 7 April 2000, lot 117 for £16,450.
