Isabel Codrington (1874-1943)

Critics who recalled Codrington's earlier successes as a figure painter regarded her exhibition of flower paintings in 1935 as a new departure. Despite her growing eyesight problems, she was regarded as 'a colourist' who employs a 'broad touch with excellent effect'. Priced at 55 gns in the exhibition, The Lily Garden is likely to have been its centre-piece, and the largest and most important of her flower paintings. Others in the series were simple still-lifes, while the present canvas with its statuary and swathe of flowering lilies depicts the focal point of a formal garden. Its centralized, layered composition and its motif, recall the late, decorative classical pergolas of artists such as Charles Sims, while the lilies, inevitably hark back to Wildean aestheticism. In its review, the Times commented favourably on the present work, while The Morning Post remarked upon its 'stately purity'.

K Mc