Jan and Cora Gordon: Savernake Forest

A favourite painting by Jan Gordon is of a sun-dappled forest. The picture hung on my bedroom wall as a youth. W.D.A. Smith had admired the painting on the wall of a room off his father's surgery and received it as a gift for his 21st birthday. It can be seen here in the Leeds house during the 1960s.


It seems very likely that the painting shows Savernake Forest near Marlborough and there is a picture "IN SAVERNAKE FOREST" in "Three Lands on Three Wheels" (1932).


Jan Gordon writes "Nothing can ever oust from our hearts the landscapes of our childhood. That collection of images first recorded by our unreflective minds, to which all other images are referred, form the background of our future world. However splendid, in whatever lovely woods we may find them, no glades have quite the magic of the glades through which we first hunted butterflies, counting the yellow Fritillary a noble prize and one White Admiral enough to spread glamour over whole years of the chase."

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