Stockholm, Sweden, has a wonderful large park. Nestled in between the trees behind Skansen is a royal summer palace, Rosendal, with its garden. The garden is now a nursery, both commercial and with the aim to preserve old varieties of roses and other flowers. The café has delicious cookies and other edibles. Spending some time there with a friend in late summer, I'd brought my "Plein Air Stealth Kit", and sat on a bench painting a small quick sketch of the Orangerie:



The building is very beautiful, and while this plein air sketch isn't going to make art history, I used it as the basis for the studio work at the top of this blog post, the Rosendal's Orangerie. (Satellite image http://kartor.eniro.se/m/Mvblq, right under the blue line, a bit lower on the image.)I chose another angle, with a field with rows upon rows of mostly yellow flowers, with a row of red ones just before my feet. Being "colour-starved" in bleak midwinter, I escaped to this warm golden day.

See a large version of the studio painting here.

If you want this painting, you'll get the sketch too, included.