The Garden, Redcroft

Edgar Wood A.R.I.B.A. 1860 - 1935

Summary

Impressionistic view of a bright sunlit garden, with pathway leading from bottom left corner toward a woman on a garden seat in the background to the right, wearing a sky blue frock. Rectangular flower beds and slender-trunked trees to left and right of path. The scene is one of lush, vegetal pleantitude, expressed through mottled paintwork with daubs of bright colour.

Display Label

The Garden, Redcroft 1915 Edgar Wood 1860-1935 Oil on canvas The scene is Edgar Wood’s own garden in Middleton, north of Manchester, and the figure in the background is his wife, Anna Maria. Wood worked alongside Henry Sellers in an architectural practice that led the way in Edwardian modernist design. He had designed his hom, ‘Redcroft’ in 1891. The garden is clearly mature by this stage, and surprisingly regular for a residence so asymmetric that it was hard to tell that it was one half of a pair of semi-detached houses. In 1914 Wood designed another startlingly modern home for himself in Hale, south west of Manchester. He left his house and garden at Redcroft at the end of the First World War, and retired in 1922 to devote himself to painting. Gift of the Friends of Manchester City Galleries 1981.334