The Old Mill at La Mortola

Sir Frank Dicksee, 1853–1928

Oil on panel

21 x 14 ¼ inches.

Provenance: Herbert Dicksee, the artist's cousin, and thence by descent

The famous gardens of La Mortola, near Ventimiglia in north- west Italy, were created by a wealthy English Quaker, Thomas Hanbury, who had made a fortune in Shanghai property. He is the man who gave Wisley to the RHS. During the Great War the gardens were devastated, but in the 1920s, Henry’s daughter-in- law, the elegant Dodo Symons-Jeune, set about restoring them. Forty-four acres of gardens tumble 100 metres down to the sea amongst streams and rocks. In 1925, Dicksee, beset by the terrible responsibility of the Presidency of the Royal Academy, staunchly opposed to Modernism, and by now quite elderly, painted this elegiac picture with quiet, shadowy tones. Hanbury’s ashes are buried there with his wife’s, by a plaque quoting Genesis: ‘They heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.’ —Maas Gallery Commentary

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