But for a slight difference in height Autumn could be described as the pair to Mahoneys 1951 Festival of Britain painting The Garden. The artist’s wife, Dorothy, posed for the main figure. Mahoney was fascinated by the formal qualities of the Victorian red brick house, visible from the platform of Borough Green station, from which he frequently travelled to London during the period in which he taught at the Royal College of Art.

Tirzah Garwood records Mahoney’s passion for sunflowers in several amusing anecdotes recounted in Long Live Great Bardfield (Fleece Press, Huddersfield, 2012) and Love to You All (Persephone Books, London, 2015).

The same landscape appears in Charles Mahoney’s ‘Still Life with Landscape’. This is likely to be a view of the Willow Grove at Great Bardfield, also painted by Ravilious and Bawden.

In late 1940 the Royal College of Art was evacuated to Ambleside, in the Lake District. With Mahoney as warden male students were accommodated at the Queen’s Hotel, while female students were accommodated at The Salutation. This composition demonstrates Mahoney’s fondness for Victorian Gothic buildings, a taste which, like much that appealed to his eye, was unfashionable at the time.

In 1941 Charles Mahoney was commissioned to produce a mural scheme for the Lady Chapel at Campion Hall. At the full scale required in the Chapel itself he got no further than the underdrawing. This finished painting reveals Mahoney’s intentions for the mural, the wild foliage trimmed back to show how the suburban setting, the walls and rooftops – less visible in the Chapel version – underpin the composition. Sir John Rothenstein was moved to describe the scheme as ‘second […] only to that by Stanley Spencer at Burghclere’.

Catherine wheels, Roman candles, rockets. Ravilious was fascinated by the patterns fireworks make. They appear in his wood engravings, lithographs, ceramics, and the now lost mural for the Midland Hotel, Morecambe. November 5th, 1933 was painted in Stratford Road, Earls Court where Eric and Tirzah lived when they were first married. The painting was first exhibited in his one-man show that opened on 24th November, 1933, at the Zwemmer Gallery.

Predating World War II by some months, this picture is curiously prophetic of some of the artist’s wartime paintings. The workers are shown laying clamps, a traditional way of storing root vegetables to last through the winter.

The conservatory at The Cedars, the Dunbar family home in Strood, Rochester. It was later partitioned off with chicken wire to provide a cage for canaries; it features as such in Dunbar’s 1930 Sketch for Decoration: Flight.

The late 1930s saw an outpouring of gardening images from Dunbar. Gardeners’ Choice, a revolutionary gardening primer, based on a study of 40 unconventional flowering plants, written and illustrated by Dunbar and her then lover Cyril ‘Charles’ Mahoney, appeared to critical acclaim in late 1937. In this case Dunbar has taken a vignette from p.26 of Gardeners’ Choice as the inspiration for her oil painting. Of this work Christopher Campbell-Howes, author of Evelyn Dunbar: A Life in Painting, has noted ‘the greens are symphonic in their variety, with a richness enhanced by Dunbar’s particularly sensitive feeling for colour, enriched by her lavish and energetic brushwork’.

Bush and the artist Noel Laura Nisbet (1887–1956), whom he married in 1910, lived in the same semi-detached house in Queensland Avenue, Merton Park, SW19, (a gift from Noel’s father) from 1914 until their deaths. Over the years Bush regularly depicted the suburban back gardens seen from his studio, many of which were exhibited at The Royal Academy, as was the case with this work in 1940. Bush saw the ancestry of his art in the quiet dignity of Dutch and Flemish domestic scenes, and, as his younger daughter recalled, mixed pigments and oils, ‘so that his work should mellow, glow and last, and if possible, improve’.

The daffodils and trees in bud capture the Winter turning into Spring. This provides a poignant record of Britain emerging from its post war austerity.

Believed to be Percy Horton’s last work this unfinished still life bears witness to the vitality Horton retained to the end of his remarkable career, which included hard labour during World War1 when he was a conscientious objector. This is an illustration to a poem by Anne Harding Thompson: Evening primroses in a London garden. Mr Smith comes every Friday, to keep our little garden tidy. His face looks like a piece of leather, he always crumbles at the weather. He lets me help him dig up weeds, and sometimes lets me sow the seeds. In spring the irises are fine, the tulips stand up in a line. There are London pride and hollyhocks, and golden rod and purple stocks. We have a lilac and a may. The marigolds come out by day - But is the evening primrose right: it always has new flowers at night?

Frances Richards was a multi-talented artist working variously as a painter, draughtswoman, fresco artist, potter, embroiderer, sculptor, teacherand poet. From 1928 to 1939 Frances Richards worked as a teacher in the textile department at the Camberwell School of Art. Throughout her life she experimented with embroidery amongst other media. These compositions are richly evocative of the artist’s relationship with the realms of imagination and nature.

Residing in Suffolk, at Potash Farm, Evans was largely self-sufficient, growing his own vegetables and flowers, which were often the subject of his paintings. The size and technical brilliance of Evans’ watercolours were qualities frequently commented on by critics of the time.

Evans was an ardent campaigner and environmentalist. Flowers in the wild were one of his favourite subjects; they provided a critique of a country-side in flux documenting the destructive nature of the move from traditional small holdings to the large open fields created by modern farming.

Moving away from her Slade training, Adshead’s work evolved stylistically at this period in response to a growing awareness of Modernism in Europe and more specifically the influence of Roaul Dufy, to whom she lent her flat in Hyde Park.

This unfinished panel is typical of the style of ‘decorative painting’ that was taught at the Slade School of Art, which Adshead attended from 1921 to 1924 under Professor Henry Tonks. The Slade School tutors regularly set figure compositions for their students, often with suitably quirky subjects.

Compositions by Stephen Bone frequently include his wife, the artist Mary Adshead. Here she is depicted at her easel in the garden of their house on Haverstock Hill in London.

Bone’s rapidly painted ‘en plein air’ sketches were the subject of popular one-man shows at Lefevre, Redfern, The Leicester Galleries and The Fine Art Society. His remarkable productivity – he aimed to paint at least one panel a day – was only curtailed by his premature death at the age of 54.

In 1935 Brangwyn was commissioned by Lord Southwood to create a lunette decoration for the main entrance hall of Odhams Press in London. The building was demolished in 1973, but the lunette was saved.

Brangwyn saw his role as an artist as a ‘mission to decorate life’ and the source of his inspiration was nature. This study possibly relates to his collaborations with Rowley Galleries in the production of marquetry panels.

6 Downshire Hill in Hampstead was near the home of the Carline family at 47 Downshire Hill, with whom the Spencer brothers socialized a great deal. Gilbert Spencer describes this period in his later writings: ‘On summer evenings we had our meals on the terrace in the garden, which had a strong Continental feeling about it. Mrs Carline’s gardening was again of a highly individual kind. She sowed seeds as though she were feeding the birds….’ Gadshill House (not to be confused with Gadshill Place, where Dickens lived 1855- 1870) appears again as a line drawing vignette in Gardeners’ Choice, a 1937 book written and illustrated by Dunbar and Charles Mahoney.

While living at Garsington in 1922 Spencer was inspired to produce some of his finest landscapes including Trees at Garsington (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), Garsington Roofs and The Sheep Fold at Upper Farm.

In 1922 Spencer started teaching at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford. He was soon taken up by Lady Ottoline Morrell, the legendary patroness of the arts, whom Spencer had known before World War 1. He became a frequent guest among the great and good of the worlds of art, music and literature who frequented Garsington Manor, Lady Morrell’s stately home.

This playful sketch by Spencer depicts his wife, Hilda Carline, in a haystack. It is believed to have been made shortly after their marriage in 1925, and likely relates to a series of twenty-five illustrations that the artist produced for a Chatto & Windus Almanack in 1926.

Though best-known for his hugely successful graphic designs Freedman enjoyed making onthe- spot sketches in oil and contributed landscapes in oil to the ‘Everywhere You Go You Can Be Sure of Shell’ series.

Flowers were a recurring subject of Colquhoun’s art. In her view the influence of Dali and Surrealism prophetically ‘took root’ in these studies, which combine naturalistic observation with symbolism which reflected the artist’s profound interest in Occultism and esoteric theories.

In Frank Rutter’s Introduction to ‘Exotic Plant Decorations’, Ithell Colquhoun’s first solo show in London (which included Crane Flowers as No.2), we read: ‘Few things are more difficult than to paint flowers with distinction. To call these ‘flower-paintings’ might easily be misleading: plant-paintings would be more correct, for this artist is never content to paint the mere flower - decapitated from its living structure and immured in a bowl or vase – but always prefers to paint the whole plant, as it grows. She has made a special study of tropical and sub-tropical vegetation, from bananas to water-lilies, both at Kew and in Tenerife, and the paintings in this exhibition testify eloquently to her feeling for the life of the flower, for the living plant. They do more. Both in their clearhewn design and in their very individual colour, they reveal evident talent for decoration’.

John and Nell Moody lived in Brunswick Square after their marriage in 1937. Moody painted this scene from a first floor window, shortly before the house was bomb-damaged during the Blitz. A popular artistic and literary venue within Bloomsbury, former residents included Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, E.M. Forster and John Ruskin.

It was at this time that Horton first experienced the work of Paul Cézanne at the 1919 Modern French Painting exhibition held at the Mansard Gallery, London. Cézanne was to have a profound influence on Horton’s work.

Joy Wheels, which can be traced to key seaside resorts from 1910 and which remained a popular novelty into the 1920s, consisted of a highly polished wooden circular riding platform. Participants packed themselves onto the disc which at first would rotate slowly and gradually increase in speed so that the centrifugal force, alongside intermittent braking by the operator, caused people to slide off and be deposited amongst the cushioned circumference area. In the early 1920s joy wheels could either be traditional travelling versions (usually travelling fairground attractions) or they could be fixed, for example in an amusement park or on a pier. They were popular in England and Ireland and also in The United States of America.

As a Londoner, Pemberton would have frequented Richmond Park (the setting for Birch Trees), a favourite haunt of artists to paint en plein air. Easily portable and fast drying, watercolour lent itself painting on the spot and, as a result, was an adept medium for capturing atmospheric effects. However, unlike drawing or oil painting, watercolour could not be corrected and therefore required a surety of intention.

Belleroche moved to West Hampstead in 1912, shortly after his marriage to Julie Emilie Visseaux. They lived here for six years in a large detached house called ‘Glencairn’, 46 West End Lane.

The Crocodile was commissioned in 1929 by Oliver Simon for a projected but never completed calendar to have been published by the Curwen Press.