Inscription surrounded by floral border: Gorse: PD.8-1980.f.49

Materials used in production

Watercolour
Graphite

Components of the work

Support composed of paper
Leaf Height 326 mm Width 255 mm

Techniques used in production

Watercolour : Watercolour over graphite on paper

Inscription or legends present

• Text: 95
• Location: Recto, upper right
• Method of creation: Watercolour

• Text: Mountain gorses, ever golden, / Cankered not the whole year long! / Do ye teach us to be strong / Howsoever pricked and holden / Like your thorny blooms, and so / Trodden on by rain and snow, / Up the hill-side of this life, as bleak as where ye grow? / Mountain blossoms, shining blossoms, / Do ye teach us to be glad / When no summer can be had, / Blooming in our inward bosoms? Ye, whom God preserveth still / Set as lights upon a hill, / Token to the wintry earth that Beauty liveth still! / Mountain gorses, do ye teach us / From that academic chair / Canopied with azure air, / That the wisest word man reaches / Is the humblest he can speak? / Ye, who live on mountain peak, / Yet live low along the ground, beside the grasses meek!
• Location: Recto
• Method of creation: Watercolour

• Text: Mountain gorses, since Linnaeus / Knelt beside you on the sod, / For your beauty thanking God, - / For your teaching, ye should see us / Bowing in prostration new! / Whence arisen, - if one or two / Drops be on our cheeks - O world, they are not tears but dew. / E.B. Browning. / When with a serious musing I behold / The grateful and obsequious Marigold, / How duly ever morning she diplays / Her open bresat where Titan spreads his rays; / How she observes him in his daily walk, / Still bending towrds him her small slender stalk; / How, when he down declines, she droops and mourns, / Bedewed as 'twere with tears till he returns; / And how she veils her flowers when he is gone, / As if she scornèd to be looked upon / By an inferior eye; or did contemn / To wait upon a meaner light than him, - / When thus I meditate, methinks the flowers / Have spiritis far more generous than ours, / And give us fair examples to despise / The servile fawnings and idolatries / Wherewith we cout the earthly things below, / Which merit not the service which we show. / G. Wither.
• Location: Verso
• Method of creation: Watercolour

Identification numbers

Accession number: PD.8-1980.f.49
Primary reference Number: 44185
Stable URI

Audit data

Created: Saturday 6 August 2011 Updated: Monday 3 August 2020 Last processed: Tuesday 13 June 2023

Associated departments & institutions

Owner or interested party: The Fitzwilliam Museum
Associated department: Paintings, Drawings and Prints