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Talk | Private & Public: Finding the Modern British Garden

Join Liss Llewellyn’s Gallery Manager, George Richards, for an exclusive talk that will delve into some of the key themes of our latest exhibition, Private & Public: Finding the Modern British Garden, focusing particularly on the ‘public’ aspect of this exhibition, and the rise of urban garden painting during the Edwardian and Interwar periods.   

The talk will begin by exploring the work of artists from the Camden Town Group – who recorded the scabrous façades and shabby gardens of the City – before charting the surge in images of public recreation, as artists painted pleasure parks and funfairs, and sought to capture these fresh, modern experiences.    

From here, the discussion will consider these urban views amidst the popularity of flâneuse novels such as Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway (first published in 1925), and the vogue for ‘street haunting’, as Woolf referred to it, could be said to have found its pictorial form during this period, as works in the exhibition reveal a number of artists’ delight in painting quirky facades, secret courtyards, unexpected green spaces and ordered, historic squares.  These authors championed a new way of seeing and valuing urban and suburban space, and many artists appear to have answered this call, creating a slew of marvellous, somewhat off-kilter metropolitan scenes.  

Bio

  • George Richards

    George Richards

    George studied History of Art in Oxford and at the University of Leiden, and was formerly the curator of the UCL Art Collections. He has been the Gallery Manager at Liss Llewellyn for almost six years, where he leads on the Gallery's exhibition programme, and works in association with museums and cultural venues to encourage the reappraisal of some of the lesser known figures of Modern British Art.

Image: John Moody (1906-1993), Brunswick Square, c. 1940. Image courtesy of Liss Llewellyn