Impressionists in their Gardens

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CONTENTS Introduction Through the Garden Gate

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Chapter One: The Garden as Canvas

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Plants as Paint

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Chapter Two: The Impressionists’ Nurseryman – Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac

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Food for Love

48

Rest and Relaxation

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Chapter Three: French Impressions under Norman Skies – Monet at Giverny

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Harnessing the Light

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Chapter Four: American Impressions – Childe Hassam and Celia Thaxter on Appledore

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Sound Sensations

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Chapter Five: English Impressions – Home and Garden with Gertrude Jekyll

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Impressionist Children

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Fur, Fowl and Flutter

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Chapter Six: Australian Impressions – Frederick McCubbin and Fontainebleau, Mount Macedon

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Capturing the Light

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Chapter Seven: French Impressions under Mediterranean Skies – Renoir at Les Collettes

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In Memoriam

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Index

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Impressionists in their Gardens

Frederick Frieseke, Lilies. Oil on canvas, 65.4 x 81.6cm (25 1⠄2 x 32 1⠄8 in.), by 1911 Frieseke painted Lilies in Giverny, featuring his elegant wife Sarah and a friend with a pot of coffee. A jolly planting of pansies forms the narrow border lining the terrace. The woman in white’s glance draws the viewer to the tall virginal blooms of the magnificent and newly introduced Lilium regale behind her. As well as birdsong, one senses that someone might just be playing the piano inside and its melody is carrying out into the garden. The Friesekes stayed in Giverny throughout World War I and, like Monet, they could hear the sounds of battle from their garden.

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Impressionists in their Gardens

The house at Giverny seemingly afloat in an ocean of flowers and bulbs in early May. In the foreground expensive rare tulips are mixed with pansies, whilst taller Crown Imperials stand in majestic orange and red above the other flowers. Note Monet’s blue and white ceramic pots and beyond the pink tulips in a haze of forget-me-nots.

paintings. The fulsome planting around the house and verandah ensured that the effect was like a ship on a tide of flowers, no statuary but an array of cleverly devised iron, green painted supports that took the pictorial composition into the sky.

The trunks of the spruce remained the support for the roses along the Grand Allée until they were replaced by the now famous iron arches in the 1920s. The earth at the base of the allée was built up to create what are known as ‘carp’s back’ beds. This maximises the soil available for massing plants, the flowers climb up to seek the light, spread and cascade down, and the floral effect was completed by nasturtiums at the base which then scrambled across the central path. The iron arches form the backbone of the upper garden but deceive the eye away from its symmetry and perspective. By the end of summer the interior has become a green tunnel – no earth and no sky. When viewed from the bedrooms the eye darts back and forth across its arches before being taken on to the roof of the Japanese Bridge and the copper beech in the lower water garden.

John Leslie Breck, Garden at Giverny (In Monet’s Garden). Oil on canvas, 46 x 55.6 cm (18 x 22 in.) Frame 64.5 x 74cm (25 x 29in.), between 1887 and 1891 In 1887 Breck settled in Giverny, where he was invited by Monet to paint the garden, a rare incident and a great privilege. His small brushstrokes plump up the flowers and enhance their light sensations. The sunlight running along the path also reflects up into the flowers, showing how the flower gardens had developed in the first five years. The effect is less linear than can be seen today.

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Impressions under Norman Skies: Monet at Giverny

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Impressionists in their Gardens

Charles Conder, Springtime. Oil on canvas, 44.3 x 59.1cm (17 3⁄4 x 23 1⁄2 in.), 1888 Springtime was painted by Charles Conder in an overgrown orchard at Thomas Griffith’s farm on the Richmond side of the Hawkesbury River, a popular landscape for many Sydney artists. Conder gives a subtle narrative of the young nation of Australia, bright, bold and aspirational, that draws the viewer out of the garden and into the radiant light of the bush beyond. The central maternal figure is Griffiths’ daughter Abigail Celeste carrying her niece Linda, the helpless baby. Just like tending a young plant in the garden, the baby needs the protection of its mother’s arms. The toddler seeks to be picked up (although perfectly able to stand on her own two feet) whilst the older girl, possibly on her way to school and now daringly independent, leaves the garden into a wider world. The bush has been cleared, and in the fields the farmer works the land with horses. On the horizon the lure and riches of the metropolis can be seen. D.H. Souter, a contemporary chronicler of Australian artists and contributor to Art and Architecture described the colours of the spring around Hawkesbury as ‘pink and green, for English eyes in the pastel form these are hues of apple blossom, new leaves and the promise of things to come.’ The delicacy of the blossoms against the branches in Conder’s painting is distinctly Japanese as can be seen in prints by Utagawa Hiroshige such as Plum Orchard at Kameido (now in the British Museum), and echoed in the works of James MacNeill Whistler, Van Gogh and John Russell. Conder imbibed the sensation of Impressionist colour earlier than Frederick McCubbin who also used the new technique but in a sombre more traditional way (see The Pioneer, page 164-165).

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Impressionist Children

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Impressionists in their Gardens

Above: ‘Manipulating the space’ at Appledore. In art historians’ definitions, one of the key Impressionist principles was that the dominance of light and colour required a new manipulation of space. This comprised of a ‘grille’ intimation of faint forms seen through the scintillating surface pattern of light; or oblique angles of vision that suggested movement through an implied contiguous space. Gardens and gardening unpack these words into simple effects that illustrate the concepts. The grid pattern of Monet’s upper garden perfectly provides the faint form that manipulates his flowers as did Celia Thaxter at Appledore. Today, budding artists also try to rekindle the spirit of the past by painting in the footsteps of great artists at Les Collettes, Giverny and here at Appledore where easels are still put up to capture the moment and perhaps to evoke the spirit of Childe Hassam who created twenty two watercolours here to illustrate and illumine Celia Thaxter’s An Island Garden.

Left: The spectacular flowers of the agave actually spell out its death sentence echoed in its basal leaves, which twist upwards and outwards to reveal shades of muddy pink and green. Introduced from Central America, it is also known as the sisal plant because of its fibrous leaves, and the leaf tips are so sharp that they were used in the past as needles. It flowers in late June and literally drips with nectar, although only agave tequilana is used to make tequila. This image was taken in the Jardins Exotique in Eze.

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Capturing the Light

Jekyll recommended hydrangeas in borders but more especially in pots where she would encourage full blooms of pale pink. When perfect, she would drop them amongst grey foliage in her borders at Munstead Wood. In 1898 Edwin Lutyens was commissioned by Guillaume Mallet to design the house and gardens of Le Bois des Moutiers at Varengevillesur-mer. Lutyens provided details of the site and aspect to Jekyll who designed a series of gardens around the house. The sunburst arch and potted hydrangeas at Le Bois des Moutiers capture the essence of their individual design geniuses. Today the gardens and park hold the world’s largest collection of over 1,000 varieties of hydrangeas monitored by the Conservatoire français des collections végétales spécialisées.

The earlier chapter ‘Plants as Paint’ examined how planting became living proof of Impressionist principles and how the plants form an integral part of the composition. Take tulips, for example, standing aloof in a froth of forget-me-nots; the sound and grey-green sway of poplars evoking the sea; the clouds nuzzling up to water lilies in the mirror of the water; the light playing through the lanceolate olive or eucalyptus leaves; and the green tunnel of Monet’s Grand Allée. Paintings and photographs can create optical illusions, masterminded by Monet in his bid to lose the horizon or have wisteria appearing to cascade from the sky. Deceiving the eye meant removing or disguising eyesores, as when Childe Hassam omitted the unattractive plant supports and netting in the rectangular flowerbeds in the garden at Appledore. Gertrude Jekyll took this possibly a step too far in her recommendation to plant bindweed around unsightly woodpiles to disguise them – planting that might well survive long after burning the wood.

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