Spring: The Waking Earth is one of Ethel Walker’s ‘decorations’. These paintings depict allegorical congregations of nude and semi-nude women who perform esoteric rituals. In some cases, these rituals apparently relate to the changes in the day and season. Like the poet Walt Whitman whose work she admired, Walker held a pantheistic outlook—she believed in the indivisible unity of humanity and nature, and regarded ‘Nature’ as an expression of the divine. In paintings such as Decoration for Spring: The Waking Earth, the activity of the figures forms a kind of nature worship. The kneeling figure is an allegorical substitute for the eponymous ‘Spring’. She is accompanied by four other young female figures; the one behind is nude and the others are clad in transparent gauze-like drapery. The figure is being garlanded with small bright flowers, which were perhaps plucked from the verdant meadow in which the scene is set. To the right stands a shamanic figure dressed in an orange robe; they raise an elaborate headpiece, ready to crown the kneeling figure, who is about to be wreathed in a red garment by her attendants. The mise-en-scène is a wooded coastal fringe and the background is dominated by a pool of water. Deer and goats mingle harmoniously among the figures, and two fauns appear on the far bank.

The significance of these activities is uncertain. But their relationship to Walker’s interests and outlook are clear: she had a ‘love of animals’, as one of her friends wrote, even to the point of being vegetarian, and her understanding of the universe was encapsulated in these lyrical fantasies, which concoct a rare mixture of esoteric religious iconography and astute, naturalistic renderings of atmospheric effect—the play of light on water, for example—that were to the artist a means of venerating creation.

During its execution, Walker reduced the canvas of Decoration for Spring: The Waking Earth along the top edge—a crop that removed an area of sky and landscape and thereby emphasised the action of the figures. Two other versions of this subject by Walker are known, a medium-sized painting and a large unstretched canvas, both of which use a ‘portrait’ (vertical) orientation in which the upper half of the canvas is populated by a section of sky, cliffs and treetops. By removing a section of the painting and changing its orientation, Walker was making a typically imaginative development of her picture. This reflects her open-ended treatment of subjects and her creative process of unfolding a theme on multiple canvases over several years. It is possible that Walker produced multiple versions of the same subject for commercial reasons to satisfy the requests of collectors, but her process also had an internal logic of its own that demanded a certain amount of recapitulation and refinement.