Brokenhurst Gardens

This watercolour is one of Rowe's few pictures of Brockenhurst park garden in the New Forest, Hampshire. Here Rowe exemplifies the garden's splendour through his deliberate low positioning within the composition. As well as the scenes mirrored framing between the hedge rows. Rowe further emulates the luxury of the Topiary garden, capturing its tucked away paths as well as the two roaming peacocks that stand around the central fountain.

Brockenhurst estate was purchased in 1769 by Edward Morant who replaced the sites Elizabethan farmhouse with a Georgian mansion. In 1865 ornamental lakes and a topiary garden was added to the manor, however, after standing empty for a number of years the house was demolished in 1958 and replaced with a new building in the 1960s.

Ernest Arthur Rowe

Rowe was a watercolourist specialising in garden scenes. He spent his career responding to the Victorian love of formal gardens with his meticulous paintings of the grounds of the country’s finest historic houses. Ernest Arthur Rowe was born in West Ham, which was then in Essex. He trained first as a lithographer and, in 1884, began studying at the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours where he won a President’s Medal in 1885.

Initially, Rowe painted landscapes in general, but by the 1890s he was specialising in gardens. During that decade, he joined the London Sketch Club where he met Arthur Rackham and Beatrice Parsons, among others. Rowe’s early career was marked with little financial success. However, in 1895, he embarked on a sketching tour of the south coast and, upon meeting Mrs Hamlyn, the owner of Clovelly Court in Devon, became engaged in a series of country house commissions.

Exhibited
Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour, as 'Relics of the Civil Wars, Compton Wynyates', no.1