Walking with the Ancestors - Cecil Lawson

In The Minister’s Garden

Although Lawson’s bold style won favour among many of his contemporaries, wider recognition of his work continued to elude him until the Royal Academy exhibited The Hop Gardens of England (1876). The painting was created at Wrotham, Kent, where a local farmer lent Lawson a barn which he temporarily turned into a studio, producing a work that later won much praise at the Grosvenor Gallery. The prestigious venue was established by Sir Coutts Lindsay and his wife Blanche in 1877 as an antidote to what they regarded as the excessive power and ‘conventionality’ of the Royal Academy. The venture represented a clear departure from the Academy’s exhibitions, with artists designated considerably more wall space and given freedom to hang their paintings as they liked. The invitation-only policy operated by the gallery ensured the ‘right’ people got to view the works they chose to exhibit, providing an ideal climate for modern artists such as Lawson, who created a sensation with The Minister’s Garden (1878) and The Hop Gardens of England, which was exhibited there, with some alterations, as Kent (1879). Despite drawing admiration from luminaries such as Oscar Wilde, who praised his ‘wonderful landscapes’ that ‘caught so much of Turner’s imagination and mode of treatment’, Lawson’s increasing fame foreshadowed a decline in his own health from which he would not recover.