Students Repotting Mandrakes in the Greenhouse — Print & Oil Painting

Every face in this greenhouse is braced against a noise the picture cannot make. Mouths are pulled wide, eyes screwed shut, shoulders up around the ears, and every pair of ears is clamped inside thick fur muffs. The subject is not the plant. It is the sound the plant makes on leaving the soil.

The mandrakes are held up by their leaves at the end of stiff arms, and each root has been given its own small ugly personality: knotted limbs, a crumpled face somewhere near the top, fine white hairs trailing where the earth has fallen off. One of them hangs beside the professor at the left, larger than the rest, under a crown of leaves twice the size of a man's head.

The building is the best passage in the picture. Timber trusses spring from carved brackets and cross the ceiling in a run of ogee arches, the glass between them flat white with daylight, ivy climbing the far columns, a green metal lantern slung from the ridge. Terracotta pots crowd every available surface and a shallow crate of pulled roots sits on the bench in the foreground.

Look closely and the method shows itself: the faces are photographic and the world around them is painted, cut in against soft leaves and warm wood. It gives the scene the quality of a memory reassembled out of film frames. Part of our Harry Potter collection, next to the wider view down the same benches and the lesson seen from behind the teacher.