The Garden of St John’s College, Oxford

The present watercolour depicts St John’s College from its extensive gardens. The College of St John the Baptist was founded in 1555 by Sir Thomas White, a wealthy London merchant tailor, who also founded the Merchant Taylors schools. The gardens were laid out in the 16th Century into three distinct gardens; the President’s Garden, the Masters’ garden or outer grove and the inner grove. During the 1770s the boundaries between the outer and inner grove were blurred, the gardens simplified and rendered more naturalistic. Despite this there is still a distinctly different character between the two gardens, with the outer grove being laid to lawn flanked by trees, as depicted here, whilst the inner grove is more elaborately and densely planted.