Charlotte Verity’s exhibition The Season Following unfolds across six rooms at Harewood House Trust, an eighteenth-century estate located just north of Leeds. The Somerset-based artist moves through the four seasons, according to a visual process she explains as a way ‘to attain truth’. Spanning over fifteen years’ worth of work, comprising oil paintings and monotypes, it’s an exhibition that steers away from simple botanical record however. Instead, we are given a slow and sustained attention to – and feeling for – plants and seasonal change.
I visit The Season Following on a muted day in January. The exhibition begins with Winter, and seemingly poses a simple question – if the season were a colour, what colour would it be? Not too dissimilar from the sky outside Harewood House, perhaps – a sea-foam grey, smudged with cloud. In ‘January Colour’ (2019), Verity settles on a grey cooled with icy blue. Against this pale background, a tangle of thin brown stems rises from the edges of canvas, crossing and looping in fine brittle lines. Amongst the sparse leaves, we glimpse faint washes of yellow flowers – winter jasmine, the only flower out at this time of year.
Verity offers other familiar winter subjects – nodding snowdrops, slender birch trunks and the obligatory ‘Holly’ (2001), its ruby berries glinting against a darkened field. There’s a deliberate and appreciated restraint here. Beyond the paintings themselves, the only guidance comes in the form of hand-transcribed poems, three for each season, written out in watercolour by Verity on sheets of paper. Verity chooses canonical observers of the seasons – John Clare, Edward Thomas, Emily Dickinson and Alice Oswald, amongst others – opting for lyrics that favour weather, hedgerows and the small calibrations of light and growth.
The Winter room features Wallace Stevens’ The Snow Man (1921), a poem that focuses on the act of observation in the snow, on beholding the ‘Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’ Stevens proposes a pure looking, free of projection. He asks us to see ‘pine-trees crusted with snow’ and ‘junipers shagged with ice’ without intellectual embellishment, without thinking of the season as melancholic, nostalgic, or relying on any other ready-made associations. The thing is, though, Stevens has put Winter into language. This act inevitably doubles it. We are never simply with the thing itself, but also with its representation.
When I ask Verity why she chose to include the poems, she tells me she ‘wanted something over the mantelpiece that wasn’t a painting.’ She speaks too of her interest in artists such as Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer, Julie Mehretu and David Jones, in whose work mark-making and script drift and blur together. ‘I wish I could talk about the things poets talk about – small sensations of meaning,’ she says. This is, I think, exactly what she has succeeded in doing. To look at Verity’s paintings in this context is to experience her work as poetic.
In the Spring room, the register shifts. Here, we find the largest population of the artist’s monotypes – profusions of daffodils and blossoms pressed into saturated colour. Verity began using the technique during the pandemic, painting watercolour onto transparent plates, running them through a press to transfer the image onto paper. The result holds a compressed, slightly milky, fixed intensity. Spring goes by so quickly, she says, that it was necessary to find a method to accommodate this. The monotypes allow her to layer the plates up, without being minutely precise. ‘These productions are direct responses to what I saw. I love the accidents,’ she explains.
There is a pair of horizontal prints, one hung above the other, that stands out. The upper, ‘CV 2 09’ (2022), shows a clump of daffodils. Stems scatter across the page like fallen matchsticks – slightly rickety, as if scratched into the surface. The blooms are a dense yellow, flattened and bright. Underneath, ‘CV 49’ (2020) is quieter, composed of soft, green translucent forms that suggest branches, seed heads, or underwater plants such as milfoil. The watery blue-grey foreground reveals the paper’s grain, recalling a cyanotype. If the upper work feels like a direct observation, the lower feels like its memory-based counterpart.
A more recent work, ‘CV 3 4’ (2025), consists of a dense green mass at the centre of the page. It could be foliage, fungus, a wasp’s nest overgrown with ivy. Licks of paint curl into smoky white petals. Peer closer and they look like doves shedding feathers. Nearby, Verity has transcribed Bumbarrel’s Nest by the English Romantic poet John Clare. Bumbarrel is a traditional British nickname for the long-tailed tit, given for its dome-shaped home. It’s not clear if Verity’s work depicts the nest itself, but I’d like to think that Clare’s ‘mosses grey with cobwebs closely tied’ finds form in the artist’s brushstrokes.
In the Colchester Art Society Spring Lecture in 2019, Verity described what it means to paint without giving away all the details, to allow her subjects privacy. ‘One doesn’t want to explain away the heart of the thing. That needs to be protected, it is precious and vulnerable.’ It’s a position that runs through the exhibition as a whole. We are never certain of the situation of the plant on display, never knowing if we’re encountering a still life – plants gathered in loose wedges and carried home to be studied in Verity’s studio – or a plein-air composition, in which the artist battles with the outdoor elements to wrangle wind and light.
Clare’s bumbarrel builds in much the same way. With its ‘little hole on its contrary side’, the nest is structured to conceal its centre. The structure protects the bird from casual viewing, where ‘pathway peepers may no knowledge win / of what her little oval nest contains.’ In the monotype we reside in the feeling of the thing, rather than the thing itself, and in so doing, there is something kept intact, set beyond the reach of language and paint.
On the final wall of the Spring room is ‘Buds’ (2020), the largest and strongest painting in the room. A loose horizontal line of budding plants stretches across the canvas, rising from a bank of pink-orange that is reminiscent of flesh. Roses open into cotton whites and blushing pinks; buds hover on the verge of opening. Beneath this, we see faint grey forms that repeat – perhaps shadows, or roots, a second image running underneath the first. As with the monotypes, we experience two registers – what is visible above ground and then something less defined below.
Scale is something Verity does well, bringing this confidence to the Summer room, in which ‘A Summer Month’ (2019) dominates. Here, sleeping fuchsia extend across the canvas, their red tubular flowers hanging off thin, wiry stems. Like many of the artist’s paintings, we find a washed grey background, denying a stable horizon. There is nowhere else to look; we sit with the red, the orange, the turquoise outlines that appear as though they might melt off the canvas altogether.
While there are a host of floral paintings in the Summer room, far stronger are Verity’s representations of grasses. It’s a shift that coincides with Verity’s relocation from London to the countryside, where her studio now sits among open fields. In ‘Summer Grasses’ (2025), feather grass arcs and tilts into ochres and dry yellows. The concern is less with fidelity to any single blade than it is to the whole mass together. Nearby, the smaller ‘Glow’ (2023) tightens the focus. Where ‘Summer Grasses’ has a force that explodes outwards, in ‘Glow’ there is an energy that gathers heat internally. Greens deepen and press inward, while golden stalks rise sharply from the edge of the frame.
Contained in a smaller room with darkly painted walls is Autumn. Here, the subject matter is not strictly botanical. In ‘Tombstone’ (2010), what initially resembles lily pads drifting on water resolves through its title into weathered lettering on a tombstone, a surface worn by time. Time flattens language into shape. Elsewhere, there are fruits of harvest, a glowing, ripened apple or the voluptuous orange and yellow-green tones of apples fallen to the ground.
In ‘Pear Tree, Autumn’ (2005), we see the house next door to Verity’s former south London home, her residence for thirty-six years. In the foreground is the darkened exterior of a detached house, overshadowed by a bright burst of foliage, burning reds and sulphuric yellows, the oils thickly worked into a knot-like shape. For a moment I wonder if the tree has been set alight, before remembering the season. The tree recurs in ‘Pear’s Last Leaves’ (2015), another marvel of colour, this time focusing on a single bough coloured in pink, fuchsia, coral and copper brown. The work edges towards decay, its colouring recalling European pear rust, a disease that produces bright red lesions on leaves resulting in distortion and premature drop.
Verity’s autumn is decadent, delicious and fallible. She transcribes William Carlos William’s To a Poor Old Woman (1938), finding the simple pleasures in ‘a plum on / the street / a paper bag / of them in her hand / they taste good to her.’ More complex is the transcription of Geoffrey Hill’s September Song (1968), a haunting elegy that contrasts autumn maturity with the deportation and starvation of a child during the Holocaust. Verity quotes,
September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.
This is plenty. This is more than enough.
We are reminded that abundance and atrocity exist simultaneously. It’s a dissonance that feels uncomfortably contemporary, as we inhabit a time marked by deportations, border regimes and the spectacle of civilian starvation debated in parliamentary language. In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams argues that English pastoral repeatedly aestheticizes the landscape while obscuring the labour and social relations that produce it. And yet the country house is never only a backdrop, it is an accumulation of labour and empire. To stand in Harewood – an estate whose wealth was built in part through the transatlantic slave trade – is to weigh up that tension too. I don’t think Verity’s intention is to evoke these histories, but given the moment in which we’re looking, it’s hard to avoid them.
In the Spanish Library, the final room of the exhibition, is a large horizontal work titled ‘Oculus’ (2019). Across two adjoining panels, Verity has laid out a network of branches. Twigs spread out between canvases, arching up from a grey band in the bottom half of the painting that suggests a ledge or wall. It’s not the strongest work of the exhibition, and admittedly not a work I would have chosen to end on. However, it reminds me of the physical building of Harewood House, that the garden has always been seen from within the house, the house from the garden.
Harewood’s gardens and grounds extend across 140 acres, including the formal Italianate Terrace and sculpture parterre directly below the house, the Himalayan Garden, the subtropical Archery Border, herbaceous borders, in addition to meadow and woodland walks. I get the chance to speak to Harewood’s Head Gardener, Trevor Nicholson. I ask him if he was involved in the exhibition’s curation. He gently laughs and says no. And yet there is a curation that unfolds outside. The Terrace, Trevor tells me, was conceived as an extension of the house – a clipped box forming the bones of the parterre, colour woven through ‘like tapestry’. ‘The palette is deliberately tonal’, he explains. ‘We garden for the place, we don’t put any of our egos in there. We go with the colours that match the stone. Colour, contrast, absolute harmony.’ Even the acanthus planted near the steps nod to the carved capitals inside the house.
When I ask what visitors might expect in the coming months, Trevor is excited. In spring and early summer, the Himalayan Garden will fill with blue poppies, Arisaema and drifts of primulas. Daphne is flowering now, its scent carrying across the fields. Soon, there will be apple blossom, roses along the terrace – much like Verity’s loose blushes in the Spring room. Summer at Harewood promises guided walks through the valley and meadow, allowing visitors to trace the same shifts the exhibition charts inside, from bloom to seed.
After moving through the painted seasons and the gardens themselves, I ask Trevor what Verity’s paintings mean to him. He answers without hesitation. ‘I feel Charlotte paints flowers the way I remember them,’ he says. ‘If someone said to me, “Think about daffodils”, I’d think of Charlotte’s painting – not every botanical detail, just what they feel like.’
Chloe Elliott is a writer and poet based in York.
Charlotte Verity: The Season Following is on at Harewood House Trust, Harewood, from 23 January – 7 June 2026.
This review is supported by Harewood House Trust.
Published 12.03.2026 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews
2,213 words
