Dorothy Wordsworth (The White Foxgloves)
Margaret Harrison is a British artist whose work has been at the forefront of the Feminist Art movement for over 50 years. Harrison co-founded the London Women’s Liberation Art Group in 1970 and has been a central part of major developments in feminist organising and collective art production ever since.
In this diptych, we are offered a glimpse into the diaries and gardens of Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855), an author, poet and diarist from Cumbria, where Harrison spent the early years of her life.
In 1799, Dorothy moved with her brother, the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, into Dove Cottage at Grasmere in the Lake District, where she introduced plants that were native to the local area into her gardens. Harrison’s Dorothy Wordsworth series depicts these plants, including ferns and foxgloves, with a vibrant watercolour palette of pink, green and purple.
Accompanying the large-scale painting of Wordsworth’s plants is a painted extract from her diary which describes the foxgloves and expresses the joy that her natural surroundings bring her.
Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal is considered a crucial point of inspiration for much of her brother’s poetry, particularly her detailed, lyrical observations of the natural world which he heavily drew on for his own work. Dorothy’s diaries also remark on how a family passing through the Lake District on their way to find work in the newly industrialised northern cities had been refused help from the local Parish because the father was a manual labourer, mirroring Harrison’s fervent engagement with British industry and class politics in the 1970s.
In this diptych we can see Harrison’s desire to highlight those who have created worlds in the margins and to connect with women that she has shared geographic and intellectual space with.
