Variations on a Garden of Love

Mounted pin-brooch, 2007 aterials: Patinated 20ct gold, ebony, opal, silver, 18ct white gold pin

height (without pin): 46mm width: 38mm ount: mixed media Signed and dated artist’s no: 415.MP-B.07 hidden alche y: 301

Once more, the evidence left by another’s borrowing has encouraged my own larceny. In this case, the background which Watteau found in the Rubens canvas Garden of Love* tempted him to steal its Arcadian temple for his own Gilles and his Family (Sous un habit de Mezzetin), now in the Wallace Collection, London [P381]. In doing so he was, to my mind, also stealing a little of Rubens’ own personal paradise, for the details in the façade and stonework follow closely those found in the real-life garden of the earlier master’s Antwerp home. For his painting, Watteau has rotated the edifice through 90º and given us a compressed and reduced detail forming, in its seductively loose handling, a kind of painted theatrical back-cloth echoing to the raking play of the guitar and the five voices of Gilles and his Family. Mine has been a goldsmith’s approach – not usually a friend of ‘loose handling’ – reconstructing the façade of this rusticated temple, and declaring its formal symmetry en face. My Arcadian prospect was found in the dappled tones of an opal and, to repay Watteau in his own stolen coin, I have installed, seated at the threshold of this Garden of Love, the gentle Columbine and her over-amorous suitor from another Wallace Watteau, Harlequin and Columbine [P387].

* Painted c.1630, now at the Prado Museum in Madrid