Trees and Undergrowth (1885): Art, History and Details

Trees and Undergrowth (1885) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Garden William Fraser (British, 1856–1921).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

William Fraser Garden’s work was based on the rendering of minute detail with painstaking brushwork and handling of color. Here, he describes an insignificant corner of the Bedford landscape: a tangled thicket in which dry grasses and saplings commingle. Bare branches stretch across a bright blue sky, creating a pattern as intricate as a spider’s web. This may have been the drawing that Garden exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1885 with the title Early Spring in the Woods. A pale green haze in the grass, the azure sky, and scattered wildflowers suggest the promise of spring.

Object facts

• Title: Trees and Undergrowth
• Date: 1885
• Creator attribution: Garden William Fraser (British, 1856–1921)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: watercolor with gouache
• Dimensions: Sheet: 19 x 26.8 cm (7 1/2 x 10 9/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - British
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1978.52

A detail from the museum

Although William Fraser Garden received critical recognition for his watercolors early in his career, he lived and worked in relative obscurity and was plagued by financial troubles for most of his life.

Collection credit

The A. W. Ellenberger, Sr., Endowment Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• English Nineteenth Century Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings. Exh. Cat. New York: Shepherd Gallery, 1978.
• Lee, Sherman E. "The Year in Review for 1978." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 66, no. 1 (1979): 3-47.
• Lemonedes, Heather. British Drawings: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Exh. Cat. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.