William Ashford
, English, 1746-1824
Title
A Group of FlowersDate1766
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions
63 x 76.5 cm
Signedlower right: W M Ashford 1766
Credit LinePurchased, 1985 (Shaw Fund)
Object numberNGI.4505
Label TextThough Ashford is celebrated as a landscape artist, his earliest exhibited works were of flower-pieces and pictures of fruit and dead game. These are ‘polite’ derivations of seventeenth-century Dutch and Italian works, similar in format, but different in tone, effect and symbolism. Compared to his later large and ambitious landscapes, these pictures, though meticulously finished, seem constrained. The placement of apparently random detail within a symmetrical design, however, anticipates the schematic layout of many of his large landscapes.