A Garden by the Sea. c.1870. Left: Watercolour on paper. 11 ¼ x 22 ½ inches (28.5 x 57.5 cm). Private collection, image courtesy of Bonhams, London. Right: Facsimile of the page (32) in William Morris's A Book of Verse, in which the composition appears as an illustration. Image courtesy of the author. [Click on both images to enlarge them.]
The watercolour features a young woman in a medieval-style dark red gown reading a book and standing in her garden. To the left of the maiden is a raised garden bed of flowers and shrubs while to the right is a wattle fence and a clump of trees. The sea is visible to the far left in the background, beyond a row of rocky cliffs.
The subject of the watercolour was used in a page of William Morris's illustrated manuscript, A Book of Verse of 1870, that Morris presented to Georgiana Burne-Jones on her 30th birthday. Joyce Irene Whalley, Assistant Keeper of the Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, writes in a introductory essay to the Scolar Press's facsimile of the book,
Morris had not intended to do all the book work himself, allocating various parts of it to his friends and fellow-workers, as had been done among medieval craftsmen. The manuscript contains a portrait of Morris himself on the title- page, painted by Charles Fairfax Murray from the photograph profile of 1870, and it was Fairfax Murray who did all the rest of the pictures, with the exception of the one on page 1, which was by Burne-Jones. As for the pattern work, George Wardle drew all the ornament on the first ten pages, and Morris coloured it; Wardle also did all the coloured letters, but Morris himself executed the rest of the ornament "together with all the writing." It is perhaps fortunate for us that Morris added all this information in the colophon to the manuscript, since stylistically all the artists were very much akin, though a detailed study of the various parts can reveal the individual hands. [Whalley, n.p.
Apart from size, the major difference between the two versions is that in the book, the young woman is clad in a blue dress.
The watercolour originally belonged to the well-known friend and influential patron of the Pre-Raphaelites, Alexander Constantine Ionides, the most prominent member of London's Greek community.
Related Material
Bibliography
Fine British & Continental Watercolours & Drawings. London: Bonhams (9 November 2004): lot 110, 52.
Morris, William. A Book of Verse. A facsimile of the manuscript written in 1870 by William Morris. London: Scolar Press, 1981.
Whalley, Joyce Irene. "William Morris: A Book of Verse, 1870." Morris, n.p.
Created 13 February 2026