Michael Andrews was one of the most significant British landscape artists of the post-war years. This characteristically inventive oil study depicts a garden in Islington and was painted plein air (see fig. 1) in the manner of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists like Pierre-Henri Valenciennes, Richard Parkes Bonnington and Jean-Baptiste Corot. Though Andrews did not intend an explicit reference to the work of these artists, he was engaging with the same venerable tradition of painting nature from life, characterised by a lightness of touch and attention to atmosphere. Andrews’ training at the Slade School of Fine, undertaken between 1949 and 1953, predisposed him to this kind of acute observation and direct study. The small flowers in the foreground – a sunflower and geraniums – complement the wider outlook over the garden wall onto wooded undergrowth and Regent’s Canal beyond. The bold simplicity of the composition and the accretion of detail in Garden at Noel Road witness the best of the oil study tradition.

Many of Andrews’ most significant works from the late 1950s treat garden subjects. In his first solo exhibition, held at Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts Gallery in January 1958, three works depicted garden subjects: Late Evening on a Summer Day, At the Bottom of the Garden, and A Garden Party. All three works were painted in 1957, shortly before Garden at Noel Road. Andrews’ work overall is notable for its advanced thematic content and his subjects were always loaded with highly specific ideas. In spite of its fresh, direct appearance, Garden at Noel Road nevertheless relates to the artist’s spiralling ideas about the garden at this period – a place of leisure, erotic encounters, idyllic retreat, and so on.

This work was painted in the garden of number 6 Noel Road, the owner of which was a personal friend of Andrews. She has described how she came to purchase the house in the later 1950s.

[It] was a small, war-worn, and shabby early nineteenth-century house. The attraction was that the street was one where Sickert had once had a studio and it had what he called one of the ‘hanging gardens of Islington’ back onto the Regent’s Canal. I bought the freehold from my National Savings Book… [T]he attic, with a camp-bed, became a London toehold for Mike [Andrews], Craigie [Aitchison], and [Craigie’s dog] Somerset.

Significant not only as a technically refined example of a mid-twentieth-century oil study, Garden at Noel Road also has fascinating origins which suggest the London geography of Andrews’ early career. Indeed, shortly after his regular visits to Noel Road ended, he moved to a flat in Duncan Terrace – the adjoining street in Islington where his friend and fellow Slade student, Tom Espley, was living. Multiple associations of place and art history are compounded in this small panel painting, from the locales of Islington to the tradition of the oil study, making Garden at Noel Road a lively and insightful work from Michael Andrews’ formative years as an artist of great talent.