My Father’s Garden (Fort Washington), 1910

John and Dolly Sloan spent 19 August through 5 September 1910 in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, visiting Sloan’s father and sisters.  On 22 August 1910 Sloan noted in his diary, “I made a sketch in the garden today.”

In the catalogue for the 1969 exhibition of a selection of Sloan’s early landscape paintings, Grant Holcomb wrote:

Often, Sloan recorded the more intimate scenes of family life in Fort Washing.  In the 1910 painting My Father’s Garden, Fort Washington, the artist shows his father, James Dixon Sloan, working the garden that supplied many a dinner for the Sloan table.  The artist thought highly of the home-grown products, and in his diary refers to “eating great quantities of fresh meaty tomatoes, from Dad’s garden….”