The secret garden

Two round portrait medallions - a fair-haired girl holding a porcelain doll and a boy in an eighteenth-century blue coat - sit within garlands of pink and red roses arching across the top of the composition. Below, the same boy pushes a small cart heaped with flowers toward a slender tree and a tall ladder, while colorful long-tailed birds perch among the leaves against a golden field.

Rendered in a flat, decorative manner with fragmented geometric patches of gold, blue and rust breaking up the background, the surface mixes textured floral relief with smoother passages of paint. Warm gilded tones and jewel-like bird plumage give the scene a stylized, storybook glow, midway between a genre scene and a decorative emblem.