(click image to enlarge)
In the 1923 biography of Lionel Percy Smythe, the present work is referred to in its completed year of 1913. Wyllie and Rosa M Whitlaw write ‘the severe attack of influenza from which he had been suffering in the early Spring had considerably interfered with his work, so he was only able to send one picture to the Academy that year, – an exceedingly beautiful watercolour, called “A Garden Gateway”, which had been begun many years previously.’
The house in the distance is the Smythe family home Château d’Honvault near Boulogne, where they had moved in 1882. The gateway links the woodland surrounding the house to its garden, and the artist’s wife Alice, and son Philip, are at its edge with their two greyhounds. The dogs were just as much a part of the Smythe family; ‘Spider’, the black and white one, and ‘Palm’, who according to the artist’s biographers was so named ‘because her coat was just the colour of the silvery catkins of the willow’. Spider and Palm would often follow Lionel Percy Smythe on painting excursions, and became known amongst locals as ‘les trois squelettes’ – the three skeletons. A whole chapter of his biography is dedicated to the family’s beloved pets, many of whom they rescued.
A review from the Globe in June 1913 calls
A Garden Gateway ‘one of the most charming things in the [watercolour] room’ of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition that year.
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