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Overview
The British artist Geoffrey Wedgwood (1900-1977) was born in Leek, Staffordshire, the son of Jane and Frank Wedgwood, an engineer. Brought up in Liverpool, Wedgwood attended the Liverpool Institute and then served with the British Army in the First World War. From 1919 to 1921 he studied at the Liverpool City School of Art. Winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, London, he studied engraving there under Sir Frank Short and from 1924 under his successor Malcolm Osborne. Both these senior artists are also represented in Te Papa's collection.
Wedgwood was a Rome scholar at the British School at Rome, having won the Engraving Prize in 1925, the same year that Edward Irvine Halliday (1902-1984), a fellow Liverpudlian and also a former student at the RCA, won the Painting Prize. According to the late curator Edward Morris, writing in the Connoisseur, Wedgwood "reverted to architectural subjects; his line became harder and more precise; his effects clearer and sharper; less of his work was etched, more engraved; some of the credit for these effects must go to the printer, David Strang", son of the major printmaker William Strang.
"In Wedgwood's architectural etchings", wrote Kenneth Guichard in British Etchers 1850-1940 (London, 1977/81), "verity of the formal harmonies of square and rectangle in the roofs and walls of old buildings is relieved by gentle caricature in the small local figures that inhabit the scenes and are sympathetically observed."
Wedgwood later taught at the Liverpool Institute from 1932 to 1935 and at the Liverpool City School of Art from 1935 until his retirement in 1960. He also worked as an illustrator. His etchings for menus were shown at the L.N.E.R. (London and North Eastern Railway) exhibition of poster art at Burlington Galleries in 1933. Among various projects for Martins Bank advertising in the early 1950s, he was commissioned together with J.C. Armitage (Ionicus) and F.G. Lodge to do drawings of English stately homes.
The Pincio Gardens (a.k.a. Pincian Gardens) in Rome date back to antiquity. The name of the park comes from the former villa of the Pincii family, who lived here in the fourth century. Later the area was used as the vineyard of the monastery of Santa Maria del Popolo. What we see today is a more modern 19th-century version, separated from the nearby Villa Borghese gardens by the ancient Aurelian Wall. With orders from Napoleon, Italian architect Giuseppe Valadier laid out the gardens from 1810 until 1818 in a classical style, one more formal than the traditional terraced gardens of Rome. Aside from the trees and plants, what most visitors enjoy about Pincio Gardens is the vast number of nineteenth-century busts of famous Italians (and other Europeans) that line the pathways. There are 228 in all, but they are sadly in various states of disrepair. Probably the greatest thing about visiting Pincio Gardens, however, is the panoramic view of the city it provides from the balustraded Pincio Terrace at the Piazzale Napoleone I as it stretches out over the Piazza del Popolo.
Geoffrey Wedgwood's delightful engraving/drypoint was probably made towards the end of his stint as a British School of Rome scholar, where the Pincio was almost his back garden. The extremely tall, excessively lean pines have an architectural character to them, as do the equally slender palms. Wedgwood is better suited to art than to botany: according to Dr Pat Brownsey (Te Papa) his trees are "very stylised and not at all botanically accurate!" And, as Guichard commented, there is no shortage of whimsy and charm in the promenaders: lovers walking hand in hand, soldiers drilling, dogs taking their masters and mistresses on walks, not to mention horseriders, horses and carriages...
See:
'A View on Cities: Rome', http://www.aviewoncities.com/rome/pinciogardens.htm
Wikipedia, 'Geoffrey Wedgwood', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Wedgwood
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art June 2018