By Ella Finney, Assistant Curator
British painter and sculptor Ivor Abrahams RA (1935-2015) was fascinated by English gardens. Dialling in on the artificial, often uncanny appearance of neatly clipped, slightly chilling ‘good neighbour’ hedges and the postcard-perfect bourgeois herbage he saw in suburbia, this artwork, Summer Sundial, was part of his evolving oeuvre of works investigating the ‘gardenesque.’
Abrahams described the gardenesque as the design of a suburban garden using elements – originally from eighteenth century gardens – intended to provoke a prescribed response by rule. A successor to the simpler ‘picturesque’ gardening style, Abrahams represented the gardenesque as an overstuffed, gaudy and riotously coloured approach to gardening that emerged from the Victorian age. Think beautifully sculpted geometric hedges and brightly coloured parterres.
Ivor Abrahams began work on the print Summer Sundial in 1971, using a small, poor-quality illustration cut out from the popular magazine, Amateur Gardening. Abrahams rephotographed, enlarged and worked the illustration into a photo stencil, before screen-printing the design and adding a final layer of flocking to highlight the brightly coloured shrubbage crawling its way over the sundial in summery jubilation. This portion in our collection is a cut-out from the original print, constructed to fit like a jigsaw piece inside a background of lawn area which in this instance has been cut away (an example of the complete work is in the Tate’s collection).
Like other successful Pop Art works, Summer Sundial, exposes the vulgarity of assumed good gardening taste adopted by local governments, commercial firms, and the suburban bourgeoisie through a heavy dose of satire. The hot colours and uncanny texture of the flocked plants cleverly underscore the artificial and contrived nature of this garden arrangement and produce an eerie feel.
Flock was originally invented in the late 17th century to imitate expensive cut-velvet hangings, on wallpaper. The luxurious aristocratic love of flock wallpapers continued well into the mid-19th century, until the Victorian obsession with cleanliness took hold. Lighter colours and washable ‘sanitary’ wallpapers supplanted dark velvety flocks – and the fashion for flock paper finally fell into decline. In Summer Sundial, we can only assume Abrahams used the technique to be in provocatively bad taste.
However, Summer Sundial’s scale, reminiscent of a theatrical stage dressing, is transportive and playful. Like all serious gardening, Abrahams’s artwork also takes us on a journey into a private world.
We recently acquired this work for the Garden Museum collection along with Abraham’s sculpture, ‘Garden Rockery.’