The garden at 13 Park Lane, Norwich

The present work depicts the garden of Michael Andrews' family home in Park Lane, Norwich, which he used as a fictional backdrop for several paintings in the mid to late 1950s. Andrews' work is characterised by a quiet intensity that requires concentration and consideration to unravel its intricacies. He was part of the famed School of London, a distinguished group that included Bacon, Freud, Kossoff and Auerbach. They sought to introduce a subjective approach to realism which provided a counterpoint to the prevailing American gestural abstraction. Andrews’ paintings of the British countryside are part of a noble tradition of landscape painting that has dominated the medium for centuries. Belying the apparently tranquil and beguiling simplicity of his landscapes, his interests were deeply rooted in the existential and the philosophical. Renowned for his fastidiously slow working methods and consequentially extremely limited output, each painting is a rare jewel that makes its own unique statement. As Lawrence Gowing comments, ‘They are a kind of picture that no one else paints - highly specific, thoroughly observed images, which are nevertheless ultimately symbolic, and on that level indispensable to a meaning that is increasingly personal and enigmatic’ (L. Gowing, exhibition catalogue, Michael Andrews, London, Hayward Gallery, 1980, p. 11).