Oatlands mansion from the garden, finished?

I haven't done any painting since October 26, the last day I painted at Oatlands. But today I finally managed to work on the large painting of Oatlands mansion from the garden. I wanted to keep the house looking kind of out of focus, and have the foreground garden be the center of interest and "narrator object". I don't love working on a painting without the subject in front of me, since I'm an observational painter, but for this I used one of the photos that I took there. I hope I didn't overly stylize the leaves of the Canna plants. I wanted to keep it kind of gestural and not too specific. Same with the white balusters of the wall. 

An unusual thing about this composition, where I broke a rule, is that the balustrade cuts the painting in half horizontally. I wanted to see if I could make the composition work anyway.

Normally, my plein-air paintings "are what they are" - I hardly every go back into them, because they're a record of the conditions at the time. I don't usually paint from photographs. For this painting, I tried to just tweak it and clean it up in the studio, filling in gaps where the white of the canvas showed through, repainting the entire sky, and punching up the color where the sun is filtering through the Canna plants. I hope I didn't overwork it, but I'm stopping here. (Sorry about the slight glare in the upper-left sky.)

Oatlands Mansion from the Garden, oil on canvas, 31" x 25"