It is fortunate that this watercolour has been inscribed with the details of the subject for otherwise it would have been impossible to identify the modest summer house depicted by Girtin. Samuel Wood (1704–94) was a prosperous goldsmith whose granddaughter, Mary Howett (d.1835), married Girtin’s earliest patron, the antiquarian and amateur artist James Moore (1762–99) in 1786. It was Moore who presumably commissioned this watercolour. Southgate was then a small village, located about fifteen kilometres from the centre of London, from where Wood was said, even in the ‘last two years of his life … to ride on horseback to town, every week, to transact business at Goldsmith’s-hall, being the father and oldest member of that company’.¹ Other than the family connection, Moore’s motive in commissioning a view of a corner of Wood’s garden is not known, though it may be linked to the woman shown in the foreground, who is noted in an old label as ‘Rebbeca Dales’, though she remains unidentified. 

Given that so many of Moore’s commissions to Girtin were worked from the patron’s own amateurish sketches, it is unlikely that the artist made the journey to Southgate himself. The watercolour has faded badly, in contrast to the bulk of the drawings Girtin made for Moore, suggesting that as an object of personal significance it may have been framed for display by the patron. The work’s poor condition makes dating it difficult, but I suspect that it was probably made a year or so after Wood’s death, perhaps around 1795–96, and that it therefore had a quasi-memorial function.