Park Life: Phenomenal Paintings Of London's Peaceful Side

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"Emma Haworth was the first artist I fell so in love with that I knew I had to take her home. I wanted her world in my house." So says Caitlin Moran, in the foreword to a new collection of Haworth's meticulous works.

Though the London-based artist sets her scenes in great metropolises — like New York, Paris and London itself — the built environment takes a backseat, foregrounded by the shifting seasons of blossoming trees, rose gardens in fragrant bloom, crispy carpets of autumnal ferns, and lakes glistening with ice.

City dwellers — recalling perhaps the figures painted by Piero di Cosimo and Pieter Bruegel the Elder — flourish in these semi-natural settings, taking an early morning jog through the birch trees of Richmond Park, or an evening dip in the waters of London Fields Lido. As one writer puts it: "These busy little figures are set against the eternal, majestic backdrop of ever-shifting seasons, capturing that sense of T.S. Eliot’s 'still point of the turning world'.

Wildlife and pets are just as important — a whisper of moths flutters over moonlit Streatham, dogs joyfully lollop across the grass, and there's the occasional green flash of a parakeet.

The paintings here — which are not just accomplished, but verge on the therapeutic — are part of a collection of Haworth's works that feature in the new book To Everything There is a Season: The Art of Emma Haworth. They also appear at a free exhibition at Rebecca Hossack gallery in Fitzrovia this September.

If ever you needed proof that London can sometimes be a peaceful — dare we say relaxing — place, then these paintings are it.