Cypresses, Villa D’Este, Tivoli

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.