![In the Minister's Garden [The Minister's Garden]](6.jpg)
In the Minister's Garden [The Minister's Garden] , by Cecil Gordon Lawson (1849-1882). Oil on canvas, 72 1/2 x 108 1/4 inches (184.2 x 275 cm). Collection of the Manchester Art Gallery, accession no. 1883.6. Downloaded from Art UK on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND) licence. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
In the Minister's Garden was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1878, no. 21. It was painted from studies the artist had made on a little hillside in the neighbourhood of Sandhurst. In 1877 Lawson, his brother Malcolm and his friend Heseltine Owen, did a walking tour into Surrey. "At Guildford we took the train to Sandhurst, where Cecil was staying with our mutual friend, Mr. Alfred Deacon. There he showed us the point from which he proposed painting The Minister's Garden, and he then described to us the idea that he had in his mind. We discussed it together, and I remember well we unanimously agreed that, if painted on a large scale, it would probably make his name" (68).
The work was painted as a tribute to the memory of Oliver Goldsmith and is now generally considered Lawson's masterpiece. The scene depicted is the garden looking downwards from the minister's cottage to the distant landscape. Beehives are seen placed on a bench to the left. Flowers, especially the tall white hollyhocks, as well as a solitary pine tree and a low apple tree, dominate the foreground, particularly the left-hand side. Rows of large cabbages are growing immediately behind the flowers. In the midground can be seen a group of three children, attended by two men in dark clothes. Agricultural workers are labouring in the fields further distant to the right. A cottage and rolling hills are seen in the distance.
Even prior to it being exhibited The Magazine of Art prophesied its success: "In the studio of the late Bernie Philip Mr. Cecil G. Lawson has pitched his art-camp. His pictures this year are intended for the Grosvenor Gallery, where he will divide the place d'honneur with Mr. Burne-Jones. His two principal canvases are The Minister's Garden and In the Valleys – a Pastoral. In the first we have the wild, sweet-flowered plot of the good man 'passing rich on forty pounds a year.' This work will, we predict, be one of the principal landscapes of the year" (25).
The prediction for the success of this picture proved true when it was shown at the Grosvenor. A critic for The Art Journal felt its merits raised Lawson to the rank of distinguished British landscape painters: "The great features in the West Gallery are the two noble landscapes of Cecil G. Lawson, an artist whom Sir Coutts Lindsay may be said to have discovered, or whose surpassing talents, at all events, he has been the first adequately to recognise and place before the world. The one in the place of honour, called In the Minister's Garden (21), represents beehives and hollyhocks in the foreground, under a great Scotch fir, with a grand Rubens-like stretch of country beyond…We have no space to enter into technical details, further than to say that Mr. Lawson's style is bold, large, truthful, and entirely his own; and we may add that he has now taken his place among the few British landscape painters who really deserve the name of distinguished or great" (155).
The Portfolio considered that this painting helped to establish Lawson's reputation as a landscape painter: "A picture of large and simple feature, impressive colour, and perfectly sweet tone, was The Minister's Garden, by Mr. Cecil Lawson, a young artist who had already won his spurs, but who yet may be said to have dated his celebrity as a landscape-painter from this exhibition." (12). F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum found the painting noteworthy: "Another new exhibitor and one of the most conspicuous in the gallery, representing as he mainly does landscape art pure and simple, is Mr. Cecil Lawson, whose two pictures – one of them in the place of honour - are large and full of subject, original in treatment, vigourous in handling, and noteworthy in many respects" (579). A critic for The Builder gave it an extensive review, mostly laudatory but with some reservations:
The centre portion of the end wall is occupied by a large landscape by a painter not yet much known to fame, but who bids fair to be further heard of, Mr. Cecil Lawson, whose picture In the Minister's Garden (21), is described as "a tribute to the memory of Oliver Goldsmith," we presume with some reference to The Deserted Village: no other connexion occurs to us, at least. This is a very large and elaborate work, painted with great feeling for colour, but wanting rather in aerial effect, – a result, we think, arising from a deficiency of force in the foreground, and of delicacy of gradation in the distance: the whole seems to be too much under the same conditions of aerial tone. [447]
L.S. Cook in The Dublin University Magazine considered Lawson's landscapes the finest in the whole collection exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery: "The most important of the three in the Grosvenor Gallery is from Oliver Goldsmith, In the Minister's Garden. We seem to stand there among the profusion of sweet, old-fashioned garden flowers, and the cabbages growing side by side with them. There are delicate pink hollyhocks, red and yellow roses, nasturtiums, and poppies, marigold, sweet peas, carnations and blue larkspur. The beehives stand in a row on the bench. Beyond, stretches the moorland in far perspective, with varying light and shade, up to the blue sky and floating summer clouds" (741).
The painting was one of the posthumous works included in the exhibition of Lawson's landscapes held at the Winter Exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1882-83, no. 152. At that time The Magazine of Art had these comments about Lawson's oeuvre:
The hundred or so pictures left by the late Cecil Lawson comprise a gathering at once interesting and impressive. Among them is much that is false in sentiment, gross in color, and elaborately artificial in manner. There is much, however, – as, for instance, the solemn, noble 'Pool;' the large, liberal, Rubens-like Ministers Garden; - that is notable in many ways; as imagination and as craftsmanship, in composition, handling, and feeling alike. And it is impossible to consider the collection as a whole without a great respect for the artist's talent and ambition, and without reflecting that English landscape was significantly unfortunate in his death" (x).
The Portfolio also commented on the works by Lawson included in his posthumous exhibition held at the Winter Exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1882-83: "It was but a few years ago since that Mr. Lawson took the public by surprise, in the exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, with two large landscapes – one of them called The Ministers Garden – both solidly painted in a deep, forcible key in a certain broadly effective and generalized style. The pictures received notice of a socially very distinguished kind; and artists acknowledged in them a certain executive power, and a novel combination of modern sentiment with a style founded on Gaspar Poussin, but largely tinged by the French impressionist influence" (130). The critic of The Spectator had these comments on Lawson's work in this same exhibition, particularly its relationship to the Old Masters:
If it be, we can only say that we know no other way of describing the peculiar strength and weakness of this artist, than that of saying that he was always seeing and seeking after truths which he was not capable of fully delineating. Two outside characteristics of his work, visible to every one who looks at it even carelessly, are its grasp of a landscape as a whole, and its curious mingling of ideality and realism. The first characteristic is very marked, and goes far to separate Mr. Lawson's work from that of all living English landscapists; speaking broadly, we doubt whether there are more than one or two of our artists who can at all rival him in this respect. At the time when his large picture of The Minister's Garden: a Tribute to the Memory of Oliver Goldsmith was first exhibited, it was commonly said amongst artists and critics, "Of course, he is trying to imitate Rubens." It is so easy to catalogue a young man's work like that, and think the label is an explanation. Besides, it may possibly be some satisfaction to those artists who have not hitherto been able even to imitate Rubens. And a little later, Mr. Lawson was supposed to be imitating Turner; and later still, Rembrandt; and it was during this last stage of his work that he died. Not a bad judge apparently this young landscapist in the models he selected for imitation, and perhaps it may be a little to his credit when we come to think of the matter, that folks should be unable to criticise his works, without referring to such names as Rubens, Rembrandt, and Turner. [1684]
When the painting was reproduced as in illustration in The Magazine of Art in 1884 it was accompanied by a description both praising the picture as well as pointing out its deficiencies:
Striking and interesting as Lawson's work is, it was, almost from the beginning to end, tentative, incomplete, and to a large extent reflective of a sedulous study of certain Old Masters. And yet, with strong reminiscences of Hobbema and Rubens, and in a less degree of Ruysdael and Constable, he combined an impressionism which is pretty much his single claim to originality – an impressionism as passionate as it was ambitious and melodramatic… so it is difficult to conceive The Minister's Garden being produced anywhere else than in front of the landscape it purports to represent. It is a deliberate record of facts, rendered with a fidelity not altogether remarkable, perhaps, but with a breadth and vigour rare in such youthful work. That the picture has its faults it were idle to deny. Even Mr. Gosse, friend, and biographer of the painter, has been constrained to deprecate the size of the cabbages as individuals, and their odd projection from true perspective as a mass. One is tempted to wish, too, that the general colouring had a little more of the grateful warmth of noble Rubens, which Lawson seems to have had in his mind – the Château Stein [A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning] in the National Gallery; and it is open to remark that the sentiment suggested by the very happy title seems to find no positive expression in the picture itself. These matters notwithstanding, the work remains a fine one, full of strong and generous colour, of patient and effective realisation, and of a vigourous if someone vague imagination. [483]
Bibliography
"Art Chronicle." The Portfolio XIII (1882): 130-131
"Art in December." The Magazine of Art VI (1883): ix-xii.
Art. The Grosvenor Gallery. Third Notice." The Spectator LV (30 December 1882): 1683-84.
Cook, L. S. "Among the Pictures." The Dublin University Magazine XCI (1878): 732-41.
"The Grosvenor Gallery." The Art Journal New series XVII (1878): 155.
"The Grosvenor Gallery." The Builder XXXVI (4 May 1878): 447-48.
"Half-Hours in the Studio." The Magazine of Art I (1878): 23-27.
"The Minister's Garden." The Magazine of Art VII (1884): 483-84.
Owen, Heseltine. "In Memoriam: Cecil Gordon Lawson." The Magazine of Art XVII (1894: 1-6, 64-70.
"Retrospect of 1878." The Portfolio X (1879): 10-14.
Stephens, Frederic George. "The Grosvenor Gallery." The Athenaeum No. 2636 (4 May 1878): 579.
Created 14 June 2023