When Empress Josephine collected roses and Paxton designed his glasshouse
Musings on impressionist gardens
Gardens are the most ancient form of human engagement with nature.
The beginnings of gardening and garden creation go back a long time, when gardens played mainly an utilitarian role. For example, a monastery garden – hortus conclusus, was an enclosed garden, with plants cultivated for their medicinal, food or flavouring purposes.
The hortus conclusus was a garden that was separated from the wild. It was an organised sanctuary, a refuge, controlled by the monks, humans. This type of garden contrasted sharply with the outer world, controlled by nature.
With time a shift in the use of the garden was seen. This was clearly visible during the Renaissance. With the development of science and print especially, the understanding of plants developed greatly and the gardens that were created often expressed the idea of mastery and ordering of nature by a human. These gardens were designed to please the viewer.
From the humble beginnings of a productive garden, a more elaborate form of a garden came to life. This was an ornamental garden, where gardening and the garden itself developed into an art form. This meant the plants were appreciated for their beauty, fragrance, colour and shape.
The arrival of new plants in the late 19th century, as a result of the breeding of new cultivars in Central Europe, especially roses, along with the Joseph Paxton’s glasshouse, which allowed for cultivation of more exotic and fragile plants, helped to create gardens filled with new and striking floral colours and types.
It was a pleasure garden, a pleasant place – locus amoenus, where plants were appreciated mainly for their beauty.
This garden style was clearly reflected in many impressionist paintings.
Impressionist artists often used the setting of a garden to experiment with colours, new paints and contrasts.
This led to the creation of artist’s gardens. These were personal spaces, grown and painted by the artist. The artist/gardener was intimately attached to its garden and Claude Monet often called his garden in Giverny “the most beautiful work of art”.
Moreover, many impressionist painters/gardeners developed a keen interest in botany. They were constantly exchanging knowledge, plants and seeds with their artists friends and often visited horticultural exhibitions together.
Artists’ passion for gardens and their deep interest in horticulture and gardening brought to life some of the most beautiful paintings of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.
One of the most recognisable impressionists works of art is a series Monet’s Water Lillies, which can be seen on gently curved walls of Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris.
Claude Monet was fascinated with his new water lily hybrids. He observed how they changed throughout the day. The unfolding of the petals, the change of colour of the flower as the sun travelled across the sky, their movement on the surface of the water, and their reflections, truly a mobile theatre!
Monet’s Water Lilies is by far the most famous work of art by an impressionist artist, although it is worth highlighting other, less known examples of paintings, which focus on depicting an impressionist garden.
The gardens captured in these paintings radiate with intimate privacy. They show family moments, friends together or children playing. These private scenes bring a clear human connection to the protected garden – hortus conclusus.
Looking at Claude Monet’s painting “The Luncheon”, 1873, we can see an idyllic scene placed in a sunny summer garden, bursting with floral displays.
It shows a table, covered with a white cloth. It looks like lunch has just finished. The remains of wine at the bottom of glasses, a tea set, with cups and saucers, richly painted with blue ornaments, a silver teapot reflecting the sunlight, a napkin thrown on the side of the table, fruits on a platter, a piece of bread and a big bloom of white rose, picked for the pleasure of its scent and its beauty.
A wooden garden bench near the table, on which a beautifully embroidered bag and a sun umbrella has been left by the owner. A hat decorated with a white rose, hangs on a bush branch, shadowing the bench and the table, the hat’s black ribbons dangling loosely. The bush scatters a depleted shade on a white table cloth. At the side of the table, on the ground, sitting in a shade,
a child, a boy, plays with a wooden toy. The boy wears light blue clothes and has a straw hat, decorated with bright orange ribbons.
So peaceful, so quiet, so still, like the hot air filling the space.
Further in the distance two female figures are walking slowly, having a stroll in the garden after the meal. Their bright clothes, shimmering in the very intense afternoon light. They wear hats decorated with flowers, their poses calm and distinct.
Gardens painted by impressionist artists often reflected a female sphere, filled with an intimate atmosphere. They depicted women captured in domestic scenes, reading, deep in thought, sometimes with children.
Federick Childe Hassam’s painting Geraniums, 1888-9, shows the artist’s wife sewing. She is hiding from the sun in a shaded part of the terrace. She is surrounded by terracotta pots, where bright red geraniums are growing. The flowers and the play of the shadow on each blossom fills the main part of this painting. The red petals scattered on the ochre-coloured soil and the dark green moss growing in a shaded side of the stone balustrade create vivid colour contrasts.
Impressionist artists were also showing the garden as a place of slow and gradual change, la duree, where time passes slowly, and the cycle of nature is appreciated.
They showed the joy of spotting the first buds in spring, as well as the melancholy, that falling of the first leaves brought. This thinking is in sharp contrast to the idea of an instant garden.
Gardens depicted on impressionist paintings often compensated for the “paradise lost”. This was the effect of the industrialisation and the coming of modern era, where people started to lose contact with the soil, and the nature in general. Here artists created their own piece of paradise - locus amoenus.
The impressionist garden was a pleasant place, a place where it is good to be. Often it was a familiar place, close to the artist, at his or her doorstep. They highlighted the importance of painting landscapes that were close to their home, reflecting places that were known and well explored.
A painter Charles-Francois Daubigny said: “There is nothing like the nature in which one lives every day and truly pleases one. The paintings which result are imbued with a sense of intimacy, and the sweet sensation which you feel there”.
It is clear that the impressionist garden was a pleasant place, a place, which envisioned a better world: peaceful, bursting with colours and filtered by the sunshine, where the shadows patched the richly painted petals of lilies, geraniums, oleanders and roses, often showing how the sun travelled during the day, how the colours changed. Idyllic scenes, groups of people resting and eating, children playing, women reading or sewing, everyone calm, peaceful.
And above all the most striking: the colour green, filling big parts of paintings, and all the variations of this colour, the mesmerising kaleidoscope of shades, shapes and textures.
Nevertheless, as appealing as it was the impressionist hortus conclusus, was an artificially created sanctuary, a refuge, which deeply contrasted with the outer, insecure and uncertain world of the late 19th century.