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Lot Essay
Mary Fedden wrote of this painting, 'My painting called "The Blue Table" is one I did while staying with Italian friends in Tuscany last summer. English flowers like petunias don't grow easily in Italy in mid-summer as it is so hot and dry. But these friends lived for several years in England and love English gardens, so they always grow beds of brilliant petunias which they water every morning before sunrise. They look rather strange and beautiful among the orange and lemon trees and other southern plants which grow there naturally.
We had breakfast in the garden every morning on the little blue table. There is a beautiful black-haired daughter in the family and last summer she had an English friend staying. They wandered about together among the lemon trees, reading poetry and talking together, and the whole romantic atmosphere coloured everything I painted there.
Of course, the scene in this picture is very simplified. But for me the blue table and the petunias and a faint shadow of the landscape with the girls half seen against it are what remain most clearly in my mind and have come to be, for me, the essence of a whole Italian month'
(on a typed sheet attached to the reverse of the painting).
We had breakfast in the garden every morning on the little blue table. There is a beautiful black-haired daughter in the family and last summer she had an English friend staying. They wandered about together among the lemon trees, reading poetry and talking together, and the whole romantic atmosphere coloured everything I painted there.
Of course, the scene in this picture is very simplified. But for me the blue table and the petunias and a faint shadow of the landscape with the girls half seen against it are what remain most clearly in my mind and have come to be, for me, the essence of a whole Italian month'
(on a typed sheet attached to the reverse of the painting).