Britain’s new flower power painter
How Henrietta Abel Smith has brought old-fashioned floral portraiture back into fashion
The relationship between artists and their gardens is well documented. You don’t have to look very hard at the work of Claude Monet and his gardens at Giverny — which he called “my most beautiful work of art” — to see the influence that plants had on his creativity. Consider also Vincent van Gogh’s output, which features not only daisies but roses, poppies, irises and even almond blossoms.
Until the pandemic the British painter Henrietta Abel Smith hadn’t captured many plants on canvas. As a student she made her money painting something a little more frisky: dogs. “When I was a student [reading ancient history at Newcastle] it was an easy thing to do on the side to try to pay the bills,” she says. And in spite of warnings not to work with animals or children, “After I’d painted their dog lots of my clients then seemed to want a drawing of their child. So that became my bread and butter.”
Thankfully for lovers of floral portraits, during lockdown the 36-year-old was able to escape children and dogs. She went to the Cotswolds to live with her parents, in their “slightly falling down but utterly beautiful cottage in the middle of nowhere”. And there, surrounded by a kitchen garden and wide “overflowing beds, and shrubs and wildflowers and meadows” created by her garden-designer mother, Rosie, she too fell in love with flowers.
When her first solo exhibition opens on November 15 at the Osborne Studio Gallery featuring 53 works painted over the past couple of years, the images will be almost entirely, she says, “of flowers stolen from my mother’s garden, I’m afraid I have to admit. She hates it when I pick them, so I have to be stealthy; they’re her babies.”
Looking at the oils, it’s clear that Abel Smith’s connection with nature is as strong as her famous gardening mother’s. Each of the images — from a single foxglove and bunches of cowslips to big bowls of blousy roses — has been captured by someone with an appreciation of flora, every soft petal gently outlined, every pale white bloom delicately coloured and the composition of each stem carefully considered.
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Because she insists on only using live flowers — “You can see when a painting’s been done using a photograph, it’s very 2D rather than 3D” — she has to work quickly. If she’s painting in her studio in Chelsea she’ll often gently pack her mum’s flowers into a freezer bag to take them on the train, “and pray they make it back to London unscathed”. Then she spends time arranging them, “which can take hours as it has to be harmonious”, before she gets to work. If during the two to three-day process the petals drop, “I paint them in; it has to feel real. If it doesn’t I’ll bin the whole thing.”
Her three years of training in Florence at the acclaimed Charles Cecil Studios taught her the importance not only of being able to draw but of understanding light. For the first year, students were allowed only to work in charcoal with plaster casts as models. “It was so disciplined,” she says, “but made me realise that drawing can be taught. It’s not innate; it’s a skill.” The school taught her about light, which is why she will only work in a north-facing studio, such as her 1900-built studio near Chelsea Football Club. “As the light moves east to west it’s relatively constant, so you don’t get shadows.”
Like her mother, who has designed gardens for well-known television presenters, authors and aristocrats such as the Marquis and Marchioness of Lansdowne at Bowood House, Abel Smith has made her name quietly. Since graduating from art school in 2012 she has won the Society of Women Artists’ Young Artist award twice, and has had nonstop commissions to do portraits for prominent clients, from Andrew Parker Bowles of his grandchildren to the Duke of Gloucester, in his official robes as the Grand Prior of the Order of St John. When I phone the Osborne gallery on the day Abel Smith’s catalogue has been released the gallerist is clearly flustered. Three quarters of the works — costing between £600 and £8,500 — have already sold since that morning. “It’s been absolute madness,” she says. “I don’t think we’ve had an exhibition like it.”
That makes Abel Smith very happy indeed. “As a young artist all you are doing is trying to to pay the bills,” she says. “I don’t think I will have quite paid off the gallery, my studio rent and my framing bill if I sell everything. But perhaps next time I will.”
In spring she’s going to focus on wild flowers. And in summer, “Hopefully I’ll be able to do bigger paintings that will allow me to be even more creative.” Whatever she does, she says, will be based on realism. “I love young artists like Will St John, who has done grotesque imagery that’s incredible, and Florence Houston’s giant jelly paintings. Both have been classically trained and can really draw … But my heart always goes back to the works of 19th-century painters like Henri Fantin-Latour, whose paintings you feel you could reach out and touch. Or William Nicholson, who is a bit looser but captures flowers so effortlessly. Or [Joaquín] Sorolla, who managed to capture life with as few strokes as possible and make it look so real. That’s what I want to achieve eventually.”
Judging from the response of buyers, she’s well on her way.
An English Country Garden is at the Osborne Studio Gallery, London SW1, until December 3, osg.uk.com
