My garden flowers

Audrey Hepburn’s love of her garden at La Paisible, her home in the Swiss municipality of Tolochenaz is well documented and indeed she loved to fill the house with the fresh flowers she gathered from the garden she created. From the mid-sixties she gradually developed the garden, which was not simply created for beauty but also for purpose. Aside from the constant flow of flowers produced during the summer months, the garden supplied an abundance of fruit and vegetables for the house as well as playing host to a bevy of animals, even stretching to cows during one particularly hot summer. Following her marriage to Andrea Dotti in 1969 Audrey quickly fell pregnant with her second child. As the pregnancy progressed she spent more time at home and it was during this time that she painted two oil paintings of the garden and flowers she loved. One of which is the work offered here; the other remains with the family and featured on the back cover of Luca Dotti’s book Audrey at Home: Memories of My Mother’s Kitchen (New York, 2015). Luca describes his mother’s love of flowers ‘flowers were much more than an aesthetic passion – they touched her deeply. They were a promise of life and growth’; a sentiment echoed in Audrey Hepburn’s last screen work, the successful series she presented - Gardens of the World, filmed in 1990.