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Quatrefoil Garden by Laurence Scarfe

Quatrefoil Garden by Laurence Scarfe

Lawrence Scarfe studied mural painting at the Royal College of Art and in later years became a lecturer at the London School of Art and Design and at Brighton Polytechnic. For the Festival of Britain in 1951, he was commissioned to paint a mural for the Regatta Restaurant. Quatrefoil Garden is a bold, bright image and its treatment reflects the artist's original specialism. The title of the work refers to architecture, a quatrefoil being a carved object with four arches arranged around the centre. The almost abstract shapes, colour and balance allude to characteristics of architecture and the effect of the flat decorative structure of the picture recalls stained glass. Thus the picture surface itself becomes the subject matter. Why might Scarfe have set this image in a garden?