The vision of a young woman in a diaphanous peach-coloured dress shielding her face from the sunlight under a parasol as she plucks a red poppy from a garden bed presents a seemingly old-fashioned ideal of femininity. But looks can deceive. Knowing the company which the artist Dora Meeson kept when she painted In a Chelsea Garden in 1912, the scene becomes tantalisingly replete with subversive undertones. She shared her Chelsea studio in Manresa Road, London for suffrage meetings and was an active member of the Artists’ Suffrage League where she designed banners and posters imploring legislators to give women the vote. Among Meeson’s progressive friends she counted leading suffragists and artists including Mary Lowndes, Charlotte Despard, and Emily Ford. These were hardly shrinking violets or idle women. Even the prettiness of the model’s dress belies alternative readings of the scene. It is loose and uncorseted, much like the Grecian chiton in which Meeson had dressed the woman on the famous Commonwealth Australia banner she had designed for the Women’s Suffrage Coronation Procession in London in June 1911.

In 1912 the bohemian artist enclave of Chelsea had many gardens. The antique Physic Garden, the stately Ranelagh Gardens opening onto the river Thames, and a patchwork of private walled gardens. The painting may depict gardens at or near Meeson’s new studio at 55 Glebe Place in Chelsea where she moved with her husband, fellow artist George Coates in about 1911. Regardless, the overgrown cottage garden in the painting alludes to much more than an Edwardian sense of femininity, fecundity, and abundance. Nasturtiums tumble down the step, the robust orange flowers suspended against deep green saucers for leaves. It is likely that Meeson understood that nasturtiums symbolises both battle and victory, in which case the flowers at the woman’s feet possibly reflect the conquest which preoccupied women at the time as they sought equal rights to citizenship.

Critics remarked on Meeson’s ‘vigorous brush work’ and vivid palette. They said she was able to capture light and colour in a most striking and immediate way as is evident in this painting and its companion On a Chelsea Balcony (NGV). Painted in 1912, Meeson sent both works back to Australia in the following year for her joint exhibition with Coates at the Athenaeum Gallery in Melbourne. It was a momentous year for art in London with the opening of Roger Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in October 1912. Meeson’s contemporary, Vanessa Bell painted brightly coloured scenes of Fry’s exhibition interiors in her spare and expressive way. Although Meeson was staunchly more ‘Impressionist’ than ‘post’, they shared a similar immediacy and liveliness in their brushwork and a colourist’s sense of palette.

Both women trained at the progressive Slade School of Art and while Meeson never adopted modernism, their imagery was based on an elegant, erudite, and observant life that was soon to be fractured and dislocated. The idyl of a peaceful bohemia was punctured by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 as Chelsea was transformed into a military barracks. Meeson commented, ‘never shall I forget how suddenly Chelsea seemed to become an armed camp. Soldiers were bivouacked in Ranelagh Gardens and the Royal Hospital Grounds. It was a heart-breaking sight to see the young men of all ranks going up the steps of the Chelsea Town Hall to enlist’. Not only did war change gardens and art, but it also shut down the Suffrage movement and delayed the reform Meeson so actively sought in her quest for gender equality.

Lara Nicholls 

February 2025