EMMA TENNANT

~ Her fresh, limpid watercolours, with their thin pen line, have a light touch, but the paintings are careful, made with curiosity, intensity and love ~ David Gentleman

 

Emma’s catalogue Two Years in Scottish Gardens 2023-2024 (publication December 2024) celebrates just that. This is a catalogue only exhibition.  Please see here for further details.

 

Her London exhibition (May 2023) Plants for Connoisseurs celebrated 75 years of gardening and painting.  Please see here for further details.

 

Emma began, aged 5, as a gardener who sometimes painted the radishes and marigolds she grew in her child-sized plot. Now she is a painter who also gardens. She is largely self-taught (no formal art education) and the work of Elizabeth Blackadder has been a great influence on her art.  She has picked the brains of artist friends, particularly David Parfitt and the late Lindy Guinness. Her flower, fruit and vegetable watercolours on Japanese rice paper combine botanical accuracy with a free and lively line and, living on a hill farm in Roxburghshire, her garden is full of hardy plants that can survive the Scottish climate.  In her greenhouse rare and exotic plants are cultivated to paint and her exhibition notes about the plants she draws are historical, scholarly and practical.

 

Early exhibitions were held at Malletts on Bond Street, London.  More recent shows include Emma Tennant at Chatsworth (2013), Plants with Provenance (Fine Art Society, London 2015), Emma Tennant, Artist and Gardener (Sotheby’s 2018) to celebrate the preview screening of the documentary film of the same name and A Botanical Tour of Great Britain at the Garden Museum, London (2019).   Collectors worldwide have also enjoyed shows in New York and Japan.

 

Aside from painting, Emma has been instrumental in the current revival of the craft of rag rug making.   She designs and makes rugs in winter when there is nothing to paint in the garden.  Her book Rag Rugs of England and America (Walker Books 1992) explores the history of this craft, a centuries old tradition in both countries.

 

Emma exhibits her work every two to three years.  She showed her paintings and rag rugs together for the first time at Soane Britain in 2021 (A Celebration of Gardening) which coincided with London Craft Week and RHS Chelsea Flower Show.

 

Emma was Chairman of the National Trust Gardens Panel for 20 years and is a Fellow of the Linnean Society.  Through her paintings she continues to champion gardeners.

 

View work for sale

 

Film

 

Press Coverage

 

Plants for Connoisseurs Catalogue

 

Two Years in Scottish Gardens 2023-2024 – Published December 2024