The Pleasure Garden, with its gilt framed live lawn requiring water and attention, revives a 1932 watercolour of the same name by expatriate Cantabrian painter, Frances Hodgkins. Although well regarded among European modernists for 'her subtle, fluid colours and the way she dissolved barriers between the interior foreground and the background scene', the Canterbury Society of Arts and the City Council declined to purchase The Pleasure Garden, on the grounds it was too modern. The notion of objective 'grounds', a state of isolation, and the genre of landscape painting are given fresh expression in a contemporary work 'en plein air'.