In the summer of 1874, the Du Cane family were as far from their Essex estate as it was possible to travel without leaving the British Empire. Sir Charles Du Cane, the family’s current head, was serving as Governor of Tasmania, administering the southernmost Australian colony from the Government House in Hobart. It was there, on 1 June 1874, that his daughter Ella was born. She would grow up at Braxted Park, the family seat in Essex that had been in Du Cane hands since 1745, and she would become one of the most celebrated watercolourists of the Edwardian period: a painter without formal training whose patrons included Queen Victoria, whose books on Japanese gardens shaped British taste at the turn of the century, and whose family’s Balham land was, three decades after her birth, laid out with the kind of Japanese garden she had spent her career painting and explaining to an admiring public.
An Unconventional Education
Ella Du Cane received what her contemporaries would have considered a thoroughly inadequate artistic training, and what her subsequent career suggests was entirely sufficient. Beyond a few lessons in drawing and perspective from her governess at Braxted Park, and one or two sessions with the painter Sir James Linton (1840 to 1916), who had served as President of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, she had no institutional formation in art at all. What she had instead was a remarkable natural facility for the rendering of flowers and gardens in watercolour, a deep knowledge of horticulture absorbed from childhood at the family’s Essex estate, and the particular freedom of a woman who was neither seeking a professional qualification nor constrained by academic convention.
Her debut at the New Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1893, when she was nineteen years old, announced an artist of immediate and considerable accomplishment. Queen Victoria, whose taste in watercolour was both personal and well-informed, acquired twenty-six of her works, a patronage that required no further endorsement and that gave Ella Du Cane access to the private gardens, country houses and foreign travels that her art required. Private commissions followed, and with them the invitations to visit the rich and titled that would eventually take her to Japan, Italy, Madeira, Egypt and China.
Flowers and Gardens
Ella Du Cane’s subject was, with a consistency that could easily seem limiting but in practice proved inexhaustible, the flowering garden. She painted it in watercolour, with an exuberance of colour and a botanical precision that distinguished her work from the merely decorative floral painting that flooded the Edwardian exhibition rooms. Her work was admired not merely as ornamentation but as a form of horticultural knowledge made visible: the viewer of an Ella Du Cane watercolour could identify the species, understand the planting logic, and read the season from the blooms she chose to render.
This combination of painterly skill and horticultural literacy was what made her an ideal collaborator for the series of illustrated travel books she produced with her writer sister Florence. The sisters’ method was direct: they travelled together, Ella painting on location while Florence observed and wrote, and the resulting volumes combined artistic illustration with the kind of informed descriptive text that only someone who knew gardens from the inside could produce. Their partnership produced books on Madeira, Italy, Egypt and China, as well as the volume that made their reputation and defined the character of Ella’s contribution to British cultural life: “The Flowers and Gardens of Japan.”
Japan and the Garden That Changed British Taste
“The Flowers and Gardens of Japan” was published by A. and C. Black in 1908 and became one of the most celebrated illustrated travel books of the Edwardian period. It contained fifty full-page colour plates by Ella and an accompanying text by Florence, together constituting what remains one of the most sustained and informed visual introductions to Japanese garden design that the English language produced in the early twentieth century.
Ella had exhibited watercolour drawings of Japan in 1904, following the sisters’ travels there, and the reception of those works had demonstrated the appetite of the British public for a subject that very few of them had encountered at first hand. Japan had been open to Western visitors only since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and the combination of geographical distance, linguistic barrier and cultural difference meant that most British admirers of Japanese aesthetics, and there were a great many by 1900, had formed their ideas from imported objects, woodblock prints and the filtered accounts of travellers rather than from direct experience. Ella Du Cane had been there, had painted the gardens of Kyoto and Tokyo, had recorded the cherry blossoms at Chion-in Temple, the wisteria and the hydrangea, and the fifty plates of the 1908 volume gave her audience an intimacy with the Japanese garden that no previous English publication had offered.
A copy of the book is held in the Royal Collection, a fitting institutional home for a work partly inspired by the patronage of Queen Victoria.
The timing of the book’s publication, and the influence it exercised on British garden taste in the decade before the First World War, matters in the specific context of Du Cane Court. The Japanese garden at Du Cane Court was designed in 1936 by the landscape artist Seyemon Kusumoto, and its surviving features, the stone lanterns, the waterfall, the fish pond, represent precisely the vocabulary of Japanese garden design that Ella Du Cane had spent her career painting and popularising. That the garden was installed on land that had been the Du Cane family’s for two centuries, and that the family had produced one of the leading British champions of Japanese garden aesthetics, is a coincidence that the historical record cannot turn into a documented causal connection. No evidence has come to light linking Ella Du Cane’s work directly to the choice of a Japanese garden for the Du Cane Court site. What can be said is that the cultural context in which a Japanese garden could appear in a luxury apartment development in Balham in 1936 was shaped, in part, by the kind of educated public enthusiasm that books like “The Flowers and Gardens of Japan” had created.
A Life in Watercolour
Ella Du Cane continued painting and exhibiting throughout the Edwardian and Georgian periods, her work sought by collectors on both sides of the Atlantic and reproduced in a range of formats that made her images familiar to a public that had never entered an exhibition room. She died in 1943, in the sixth year of the Second World War, in a country very different from the Hobart of her birth or the Braxted Park of her childhood. She had lived long enough to see Du Cane Court open on the former family land in 1937, though whether she ever visited the building, or whether she saw in its Japanese garden a connection to her own life’s work, remains unrecorded.
She left behind her the fifty plates of the Japan book and the work of a lifetime across four continents, and she left behind, in the collections of those who acquired her work, a visual record of the flowering world that deserves to be better known than it currently is. For a reader arriving at Du Cane Court through the Kusumoto garden, there may be a particular pleasure in knowing that the family whose name the building carries included a woman who spent forty years painting that garden’s inspiration.
Sources
- “Ella Du Cane,” Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org
- “Ella Du Cane (1874-1943): Watercolourist,” Britain and Japan Biographical Portraits Vol IX, Cambridge University Press: cambridge.org
- “The Flowers and Gardens of Japan,” Royal Collection Trust: rct.uk
- “The Flowers and Gardens of Japan,” Project Gutenberg (Florence Du Cane text): gutenberg.org
- “Independence, art and travel in Victorian England: Ella Du Cane”: jesslibris.substack.com
- “Sir Charles Du Cane,” Australian Dictionary of Biography: adb.anu.edu.au
- G. K. Vincent, A History of Du Cane Court: Land, Architecture, People and Politics (Du Cane Court Ltd, 2004)
