£28,750
Scottish Paintings & Sculpture | 603
Auction: 15 July 2020 at 18:00 BST
Signed, oil on canvas
Note: Joseph Farquharson was a Scottish Laird, as well as a celebrated and successful landscape painter, known particularly for his dramatic scenes of sheep in glittering, technicolour snow. He inherited his family estate of Finzean in Aberdeenshire in 1918, following the death of his brother, though he had already lived and painted there for many years. Mostly, he painted ‘en plein air’ in the more rugged, distant reaches of the landscape his family owned, but in this charming scene, he turns his artistic attention to what he could see closer to home, in the domestic garden of the estate. Farquharson utilises a favourite compositional device of a lane, drawing the viewer into the scene, and revealing that the landscape does unfold beyond our immediate view. Yet his focus is on the colourful patterning of flowers in this busy border, their vivid cheer under the bright sunshine of this Scottish summer’s day contrasting beautifully with the shade created by the distant trees and unseen plants on the opposing border. The varying colours and textures of nature, across dawn and dusk, summer and winter, had an enduring appeal for Farquharson – and he could find this unfolding, day by day, year by year, across Finzean.