Artists in the Garden

In The Poetry of Things, the 1999 book that celebrates Georgia O’Keeffe’s monumental and trailblazing still lifes, the artist breaks down why flowers became her focus: ‘I said to myself — I'll paint what I see — what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it. I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.’ Her magnified blooms, first exhibited in 1923, caused a sensation.

O’Keeffe nurtured plants, observed them and painted them; in From the Old Garden No. 1 (1924) — one of many works made during summers at Alfred Stieglitz’s family farm at Lake George — garden flowers including a vivid yellow day lily, Japanese anemones and lisianthus, exemplify her fascination and experimentation with colour and form.

Artists have long been drawn to the garden, putting plants at the centre of their work; in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immersion in nature provided an ever-changing subject, but also presented an escape from a fast-changing modern world, and an embrace of a simpler life. In France, some of the Impressionists moved east of Paris, to the soft and luminous light of the Seine valley. In 1884 Camille Pissarro settled in the small village of Éragny on the Epté river, just north of arguably the most famous artist-gardener, Claude Monet, and his legendary water garden at Giverny.

The bucolic gardens and surrounding countryside became his principal subject, he returned to the same scenes to capture shifting light effects and moved around the surrounding fields with a rolling easel. In 1898, he wrote to this son Lucien, telling him that he had completed four paintings of the fields adjoining the house, each at different times of day; one of them was Meule et vaches dans le pré à Eragny, soleil couchant (1896) a rural idyll of haystacks, grazing cows and verdant pasture, with a solitary worker pushing a wheelbarrow.

Pissarro’s protégé Henri Lebasque, a regular guest at Éragny, was also known for his joyous landscapes and shimmering light effects; in Femme et fillettes dans un verger en fleurs, he depicts the exuberance of spring with a small group sitting in the shade of trees heavily laden with blossom.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir ventured to the warmth of the south. He’d already created his first garden, with his wife Aline, at their summer house in Essoyes in the Champagne region of France, when he bought Les Collettes, a farm with ancient olive groves, in Cagnes on the Côte D’Azur in 1907.

Over the following decade they continued to buy parcels of land until they had 20 acres, and commissioned a large family home with views down to the Mediterranean and full-length windows that opened straight out onto the garden of orange trees and roses, bougainvillea, along with an orchard, small vineyard and potager. His taste for informal and naturalistic gardens reverberated through his later work and the sun-soaked landscapes around the farm served as a backdrop, or inspiration, for figurative works such as Femme nue couchée dans un paysage (1902), where a figure reclines in a verdant sensuous landscape of flowering shrubs, trees and distant hills.

The American Impressionists highlighted communal gardens. In Central Park (1892), Childe Hassam’s serene, elegant figures are immersed in a lush spring landscape, with spring trees reflected in the luminous Conservatory Water. Any sign of the city is concealed by foliage, with just the rooftops of a Victorian cottage in view. The Boston-born artist, who had moved to New York in 1889, had been inspired by study trips to Europe, and immersed himself in the Barbizon tradition of working directly in nature, in this case the city’s most ambitious and freshly landscaped park.

In the late nineteenth century, the horticultural world was rebelling against industrialisation. In England, the highly influential plantsman and writer William Robinson was espousing naturalistic planting schemes while Gertrude Jekyll, who had originally trained as an artist, created painterly colour-themed borders influenced by colour theory, and the ideas of the British Arts and Crafts movement were felt in America, too. In upstate New York, artist’s colonies provided pastoral and picturesque landscapes, and chief amongst these was Old Lyme, where Florence Griswold, who had inherited a New England house and fifteen-acre estate ran a boarding house with a naturalistic garden that attracted artists including Hassam, Willard Metcalf and Harry Hoffman.

After joining the colonies, some artists settled in the area permanently; John Henry Twachtman, who turned his Greenwich home and 17 acres of land into a work of art, that dominated his output during the 1890s. The Portico (circa late 1890s) depicts an elegant arrangement of pots set against the neoclassical architecture of the house that the artist had reconfigured, and a surrounding landscape that he had shaped.

Others revelled in unbound nature. Damon’s Hill, Old Lyme (1906) painter Willard Metcalf often worked en plein air. Immersing himself in pure landscape was a key part of his painting technique, but also reflected his hobby of collecting natural specimens, which he’d done since childhood. His 28-drawer cabinet of his nests, eggs, butterflies and moths is housed at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, an evocative reminder of nature’s enduring inspiration.