James Ferrier Pryde (1866-1941)

Pryde rarely turned his hand to landscape painting, usually providing mere glimpses of the countryside through doorways and archways. However, he did paint several landscapes between 1903 and 1910 when he had periods of living outside London. During that period he also visited the Botanical Gardens in Oxford with Lady Ottoline Morrell. The landscape shown here is not an accurate depiction of nature but rather a powerfully evocative, theatrical, fairy-tale setting, which reveals the artist's vivid imagination (C. Powell, Rascals & Ruins: The Romantic Vision of James Pryde, London, 2006, p. 44).