The Grassy Path [The Grassy Walk]. 1865. Oil on canvas: 23 1/2 x 17 3/4 in. (60 x 45 cm.). Private collection. Ex. Sotheby's. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Leslie exhibited this work in 1865, no. 66, at the Winter Exhibition of Pictures and Drawings at 120 Pall Mall. The work has sold several times at auction in recent years under the title Clarissa, but this is clearly a mistake based on contemporary descriptions of Clarissa when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1866. Fortunately a description by the critic Tom Taylor has allowed its correct title to be discovered: "In the same year [1865] was exhibited a pretty single figure of a girl in a blue dress, in an old-fashioned garden, called The Grassy Path" (71). This painting was also known as The Grassy Walk. The painting features a fashionably–dressed attractive young woman in a blue silk dress with a white lace collar. The dress has a black velvet sash and she wears a coordinating black hat. She stands upright at the entrance of a red-brick walled garden with her right arm around a fence post. A border of flowers, dominated by tall pink hollyhocks, can be seen to the left leading to a brick garden shed. A wooded area makes up the backgound behind the garden.
Bibliography
Taylor, Tom. "G. D. Leslie A.R.A., Chapter XII from English Painters of the Present Day. London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1871, 68-73.
Created 8 August 2023