contemporary reflections on a place or a work of art from the past. There are other paintings in this exhibition which play elegantly with ideas of flowers in time: Reflected, Silhouetted (cat. 19) shows a tangled climbing plant indoors against a background which implies harsh winter light off snow beyond a window, the whole setting realised only by the fastidious choice of colour. Despite the absolute precision of observation it is remarkable here, as in many other of the pictures in this group, how abstracted the means are by which representation is suggested, captured, and achieved. Between Two Windows (cat. 22) appears at first to have a simple temporality – hothouse gladioli are placed between two windows which look out on bare trees and a frozen landscape. But the lights and reflections in the painting are sophisticated and ambiguous: in earlier paintings of Victoria Crowe’s, gladioli have associated with the heat of summer with, the airless evenings of August in the Mediterranean. Here they are flanked by northern windows, with subtle indications that the two windows open onto different times of the short winter day. But the flowers appear to have brought with them a fierce, redtinged light which falls on them from a source behind the viewer’s right shoulder. But there are further depths to the image: the flowers cast a warm red shadow, even though their vase reflects the colours of snow and evening, so that the whole image is located in an imaginary place and time
where the Italian August has been caught in a winter room in the north. This lovely ambiguity attends the pivotal picture in the group, a work which brings together the two most frequent tropes of Victoria Crowe’s painting, Venetian Mirror with Remembered Landscape (cat. 3). This combines the worn silvering of a Venetian mirror, which so often in her work reflects a palimpsest of art and places from the renaissance past, with the silent snowy landscapes seen beyond windows in the last moments of northern winter daylight. There are further layers of ambiguity in this picture: the rich yellow of a Venetian dawn lights up the highest and lowest points of the glass, and the beautifully-realised snow picture, the bare trees in the very last of the light, is fading at the edges as though, in a most elegant reversal of the long standing ambition of the visual arts in Britain, the recreation of the Italian south in the north, this is a recollection of the north in the south. In the warmth of the southern day, a ghostly winter night is projected into the mirror by the exercise of memory. As so often in this exhibition, time and memory, recollected lights and reflections, are the silent elements working under and through the serenity of the image. PETER DAVIDSON University of Oxford