Woodland scene at twilight

'Garden William Fraser' was born at Chatham, Kent, shortly before his father retired from the Army Medical Department. The Frasers were a Scottish family and keen supporters of the Jacobite cause. After a brief period in Scotland, the Surgeon Major, his wife and nine children settled in Bedford, where, as a citizen of the town, his seven sons could be educated at Bedford School at little expense. Six of the boys became artists and the seventh, Michie Fraser, entered the Consular Service, retiring in 1901. Garden changed his name to William Fraser Garden in order to distinguish himself from his brothers. Early in life, Garden, who had been given his grandmother's maidenname, settled at the House in the Fields near Hemingford Abbots, Huntingdonshire until 1898. By this time his parents were living at the Old Manor House, Hemingford Grey, a Norman hall later made famous by the author Lucy Boston in her Children of Green Knowe stories. Ethel, whom Garden married in 1889, gained a reputation for expecting rather more from rural Huntingdonshire than could be provided. Garden was a highly intelligent man but also an eccentric, and his lack of financial acumen meant that he was never financially stable. He was content with the simple life, painting, reading, and showing his children the beauty of the countryside. So different in temperament, it is little wonder that his wife finally left him in 1904, taking their six children with her back to Birmingham from where she had originally come. The majority of his watercolours were of the fen villages near his home by the Ouse, particularly of St Ives and Holywell, Huntingdonshire. Garden became even more eccentric in his later life, living at the Ferryboat Inn in Holywell and paying his bills with drawings. He led a nocturnal existence and one night, in January 1921, he missed his step outside the Inn, hit his head on a stone and died in hospital two weeks later, aged sixty-four. His work was exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, and the Dowdeswell Galleries, London.

Fraser Garden's watercolours are a demonstration of the late nineteenth-century revival of painstakingly observed realism. His style of work is almost photographic in detail with crisp colouring and he had an ability to catch either the heat of a summer day or the cold bright light after an autumn shower. His landscapes have an eerie clarity and are often flooded with an almost supernatural light.

We are grateful to Col. Charles Lane for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.