Meadow is a landscape reduced to its contour. What remains of the English countryside here is only the line of it, the long curving fall of a moor or a dale, laid across the wall as a soft horizontal wave with nothing standing on it. No trees, no buildings, no incident of any kind.
The surface is watercolour, and it is the wash that carries the design. Colour pools and thins across the paper the way it does in a real watercolour, so the ground is never flat and there is a constant, slow variation of tone. Across it runs the wave, drawn with the soft resist edge of a batik, where the line has held back the colour and left a faint pale margin. That single device gives the whole thing its structure.
The result is a semi-plain with a great deal more going on in it than a flat colour, and it behaves accordingly. It will carry a whole room without becoming tiring, works as a ground beneath pictures and against strong upholstery, and is particularly good in a large room where a plain would look empty and a pattern would be too insistent. One colourway carries a metallic lustre, which lifts the wash under lamplight without turning the wall into a metallic surface.
