Rienzi Gallery Talk | Works on Paper in “Perpetual Bloom” May 14, 2021
Thomas Rowlandson, Elegant Figures in a Walled Garden, 1803–05, watercolor and ink over traces of graphite on wove paper, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Stuart Collection, Museum purchase funded by Francita Stuart Koelsch Ulmer in honor of the Garden Club of Houston.
Jacques Rigaud, The Rotunda at Stowe, 1733, pen and ink with gray wash on two sheets of laid paper, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Stuart Collection, Museum purchase funded by Francita Stuart Koelsch Ulmer in honor of the Garden Club of Houston.
“You look at these figures and you think you’re somehow in a Jane Austen novel.”
Dena Woodall, curator of prints and drawings, examines works on paper featured in the exhibition Perpetual Bloom: Botanicals in the 18th-Century Interior, on view at Rienzi. Two very different artists—one French, one British—both celebrate the English country-house gardens of the Georgian Era.
Watch this Gallery Talk to learn more about Jacques Rigaud’s The Rotunda at Stowe and Thomas Rowlandson’s Elegant Figures in a Walled Garden.
• See Perpetual Bloom: Botanicals in the 18th-Century Interior at Rienzi, the MFAH house museum for European decorative arts.
Education programs at Rienzi receive generous funding from the Sterling-Turner Foundation; Alkek and Williams Foundation; Carroll Sterling and Harris Masterson III Endowment; and the Caroline Wiess Law Endowment for Rienzi.
