Trees and Undergrowth

About the Artwork

William Fraser Garden’s work was based on the rendering of minute detail with painstaking brushwork and handling of color. Here, he describes an insignificant corner of the Bedford landscape: a tangled thicket in which dry grasses and saplings commingle. Bare branches stretch across a bright blue sky, creating a pattern as intricate as a spider’s web. This may have been the drawing that Garden exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1885 with the title Early Spring in the Woods. A pale green haze in the grass, the azure sky, and scattered wildflowers suggest the promise of spring.

Inscriptions

signed and dated, in brown watercolor, at lower right: 1885 / W.F. Garden

Exhibition history

Year in Review: 1978. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 13-March 18, 1979). Visions of Landscape: East and West. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 17-March 21, 1982). Nature Sublime: Landscapes from the 19th Century. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (August 15-November 14, 2004). British Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art . The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 10-May 26, 2013).

Quick Overview

Artist: Garden William Fraser (British, 1856–1921)
Date: 1885
Medium: watercolor with gouache
Dimensions: Sheet: 19 x 26.8 cm (7 1/2 x 10 9/16 in.)
Type: Drawing
Classification: Drawing
Department: Drawings
Credit line: The A. W. Ellenberger, Sr., Endowment Fund
Accession no.: 1978.52

Provenance

?-before 1978: (Christopher Wood, London) 1978: (Shepherd Gallery, New York, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH) 1978-: Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH

Data retrieved from the Cleveland Museum of Art on October 8, 2026. The museum may have updated its record since.