Statue in a Garden is a watercolour painting of Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Italianate garden at Garsington Manor, Oxfordshire. The picture describes two garden rooms organised in parallel to one another. A neatly trimmed lawn planted with borders fills the foreground. To the left is the garden’s ornamental pond. A rowing boat is partially cropped at the left-hand edge of the picture. The eponymous statue represents a draped female nude of a classical variety. Nestled to the right among conifers, it is treated in Nash’s watercolour as a picturesque device. In the midground, the lawn is bordered by a low wall and hedgerow. These are composed orthogonally to the picture plane, injecting a gentle note of formality into the delicate, naturalistic silhouettes and colouring of the plants and trees. Beyond the hedge is an elevated lawn dominated by a large yew, accessed by steps flanked with two bay trees.

Lady Ottoline was famed for her weekend parties at Garsington, which often included many of the period’s most interesting writers and artists such as Mark Gertler, Aldous Huxley, Augustus John, Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, and so on. When John Nash moved to the Buckinghamshire village of Meadle in 1921, he came into the orbit of Garsington and made occasional visits there. His close friend the artist Gilbert Spencer was a regular guest of Lady Ottoline’s and his presence at Garsington brought Nash into the wide circle of visitors to the house.

The subject of this watercolour is identifiable from two snapshot photographs in one of Lady Ottoline’s photo albums (figs. 1 and 2). One snapshot taken in 1922 includes the writer Robert Gathorne-Hardy, who first met Nash at Garsington and whose books about botany Nash was to illustrate later in life. The same snapshot also shows a rowing boat moored in a corner of the ornamental pond – the same position in which it was depicted in Nash’s watercolour. It is plausible that the work was made around the same time that this photograph was taken.

Statue in a Garden is the only watercolour known to depict Garsington by Nash. It belongs to a small group of other English landscape art made at Garsington at Lady Ottoline’s encouragement, including oil paintings by Gertler and Gilbert Spencer. The work is executed using a dry brush technique, with exacting stippling used to give texture to the plants and longer, smoother strokes of the brush used to create gradients of light and shade. The professionalism of the workmanship is underlined by the absence of loosely applied washes. An exquisite sense of control is apparent in both the painting’s composition and its execution.