George Haydock Dodgson OWS Garden Scene or Fete Champetre

An original 1845 watercolour painting, George Haydock Dodgson OWS, Garden Scene or Fete Champetre.

This exceptionally fine watercolour by George Haydock Dodgson OWS (1811–1880) captures the spirit of l'allegro—of cheerful and lively pleasure—and characteristically for Dodgson, presents a civilised garden scene with figures in historical dress. The elegant scene here is similar to Dodgson's Fête Champêtre (or 'pastoral festival') subjects—playful garden parties, popular in the 18th century and associated with Versailles in particular, where guests would often dress in costume. But with fewer figures than other Fête Champêtre subjects, this scene also has the appearance of a theatrical illustration: the figures appear almost to walk the boards, and the composition has a compelling and elegant symmetry.

Dodgson is known as a successful and popular landscape painter, but in the period 1839 to 1846, from which this painting dates, Dodgson was mainly producing small scale watercolours for exhibition at the Old Society of Painters in Water Colours, as well as working frequently on wood and stone, producing illustrations for reproduction in publications such as The Illustrated London News and Cambridge University Almanack. Among his subjects were illustrations to Shakespeare and Milton, including the latter's pastoral poems L'Allegro ('the happy man') and Il Penseroso ('the melancholy man'). Dodgson's work itself was in fact posthumously described in 1891 as 'roughly divisible into two equally characteristic classes, corresponding to the moods of his mind, as alternately swayed towards I'allegro and il pensieroso' (in 'History of the Old Water-colour Society'). The present watercolour falls firmly into the former camp of 'garden scenes, with gay figures and green umbrageous foliage in wannest sunshine'.

This watercolour evidences Dodgson's distinctive painting style, which combined exceptionally fine detail with innovative looser handling of paint. Early in his career Dodgson was apprenticed as a draughtsman to the celebrated railway engineer George Stephenson, training which meant he drew with great skill and accuracy and a very refined eye for colour. Working in watercolour, however, he was also highly experimental and distinguished himself from his contemporaries by being ‘one of the first water-colour painters to make full use ... of a wet method, dropping spots of pure colour ... on very damp paper, blending broken tints together and wiping out touches, in an attempt to obtain a suggestive effect and atmospheric values’.