2 October – 22 November 2026
This autumn, Nancy Cadogan’s The Lost Trees arrives at Compton Verney, bringing a deeply contemplative body of work into a landscape where its subject feels particularly resonant.
Cadogan has long been interested in the relationship between painting, memory and the passage of time. In The Lost Trees, that attention turns towards the natural world and, specifically, to trees remembered, lost and still standing.
The resulting paintings are not conventional landscape studies. Oaks, orchard pears and less easily identified trees become portraits of sorts: individual presences carrying histories of place, family and community. Each work considers the emotional significance of trees as landmarks within our lives — witnesses to change, repositories of memory and enduring connections between people and place.
At Compton Verney, these ideas acquire another dimension.
Set within its historic Warwickshire parkland, the exhibition sits within a region where the landscape has itself undergone significant change, including the loss of trees through major infrastructure projects such as HS2. Cadogan’s paintings move between the personal and collective, asking what is lost when familiar elements of a landscape disappear.
There is a stillness to Cadogan’s work, but never an emptiness. Her paintings reward time and attention, inviting us to look more closely at subjects that can so easily become part of the background to everyday life.
First presented at London’s Garden Museum, The Lost Trees continues its journey at Compton Verney this autumn — a particularly fitting setting for a body of work concerned with landscape, memory and our connection to the natural world.
Nancy Cadogan: The Lost Trees is at Compton Verney from 2 October to 22 November 2026.
