Thomas Rowlandson represented an array of contemporary life, often showcasing in the same scene all strata of social classes in England. He made watercolors on his many tours around the country, such as in this watercolor showcasing a walled garden and its hothouses at a prosperous noble estate.¹ In Elegant Figures in a Walled Garden, a gathering of ladies and gentlemen enters a stylized garden at the left. A gardener hauls off a barrel, while a couple, of seemingly different ages, inspects plants within the vibrant, lush garden. There is a row of greenhouses in the background, and, at right, a tall building with an angled, peaked, glazed roof and a hot-air flue. This building resembles a furnace-heated greenhouse called a hothouse or a stove that was used for cultivating exotic fruit, such as pineapples.² They were used in colder climates to heat pineapple plants, which were distributed in England by the early eighteenth century and considered a luxury item, and thus a symbol of wealth as well as an admired testament to the gardener’s ability.³ This rarefied horticultural activity of growing pineapples became a mania among noble gentlemen in society. The location of this scene is still undetermined, but several estates, such as Kew Palace, Hampton Court Palace, Dunmore Park, and Holkham Hall, had such buildings at this time.

This watercolor seems to be a companion of The Gardener’s Offering, which portrays an infatuated, lower-ranking gardener kneeling to offer flowers to an elegantly dressed woman who ignores his encroachment while bending to pat a begging dog (fig. 19.1). The differentiation of class extends to the man peering over the wall from the top of a ladder at left. Like Elegant Figures in a Walled Garden, this watercolor similarly highlights a large, well-stocked greenhouse. Rowlandson’s oeuvre features a few amorous yet humorous encounters in lush settings, as seen in The Amorous Gardener (fig. 19.2), in which a much older, feeble husband is distracted by the plants growing in the hothouse while his wife is getting amorous attention from the gardener, and in another watercolor of gardening that portrays a man shoveling along the edge of shrubbery as a young lady heads in his direction with a watering can and two pesky dogs.⁴

The famed art historian Paul Oppé observed a quality in Rowlandson’s watercolors of this theme: “The humour is expressed with a delicacy which recalls Jane Austen instead of Smollett.”⁵ Oppé suggests that his style is “under the restraining influence of Empire taste,” with an elegant treatment of line and proportions. Rowlandson’s themes often mocked the picturesque mode, which William Gilpin had introduced in his essays and even had referenced in commenting on garden design. Jane Austen, who owned a copy of Gilpin’s 1812 edition of His Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, expressed both mockery of and admiration for Gilpin’s dogmatic ideas in her novels. —Dena M. Woodall