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.
