Art review: Impressionist Gardens

• Claude Monet's works such as Artist's House at Argenteuil dominate the show. Picture: Complimentary

WALK down Hanover Street in Edinburgh and you might suppose that the ubiquitous gulls had taken time off from ripping bin-bags to dive bomb the RSA, but the giant splats on the building are actually daisies.

They advertise Impressionist Gardens. Go inside and you will see the originals in a painting by Gustave Caillebotte. Bringing his garden inside, he painted them to decorate his house. Nearby, a large picture of his garden shows a big clump of dahlias, his mistress and her dog walking on a sunlit path.

Behind is the house itself and a large greenhouse. It is not a very good painting. Caillebotte was a second-rank Impressionist, but as the greenhouse bears witness, he was a serious gardener. So, more famously, was Monet, and Caillebotte's home at Gennevilliers was near Argenteuil where both Monet and Renoir lived in the 1870s - close to Paris, but still semi-rural.

Renoir preferred his gardens half wild, and one of the loveliest pictures in this rather uneven show is his Woman with a Parasol, painted in the garden of a rented studio in Montmartre. The woman is standing beside a gardener. He is bending to his work. The garden nevertheless looks neglected although it is filled with abundant flowers.

Camille Pissarro, politically an anarchist, preferred kitchen and market gardens with their imagery of honest toil and the productive land. His painting in the NGS's own collection of a market garden at Pontoise looks well in this company, but it was Pissarro's wife, Julie, who was the gardener. A painting of their garden at Eragny shows her working in the kitchen garden against a backdrop of dahlias and sunflowers. Alfred Sisley too painted kitchen gardens.

Monet was the most famous Impressionist gardener, however, and when he settled at Argenteuil with his young family, he began the garden recorded in the Artist's House at Argenteuil and the Artist's Garden at Argenteuil. The first picture is a study in blue, set off by the cool green of trees and of ivy on the house. A little boy wearing a white smock with a blue ribbon, Monet's son Jean, is standing in a pool of blue shadow. His mother looks out of the door in a blue dress and white hat and the window shutters are blue. All these blues are echoed in a row of big blue and white flowerpots. This lovely picture has all the intimacy and luminous delicacy that we expect of Monet. The other picture shows massed dahlias with the house beyond. The flowers we learn are the latest thing in dahlia cultivation.

Monet created his second garden when he moved further out from Paris to Vtheuil. We see the blue and white pots rearranged on the edge of a terrace in The Garden at Vtheuil, a view from beneath the shadow of a tree looking towards the sunlit house beyond.

Giverny, Monet's third garden, is his most famous by far, however. He immortalised its lily ponds in some of the greatest paintings of modern times. They are represented here, but only in three rather small examples.

So far, these pictures support the central thesis of this exhibition: the Impressionists loved gardens and painted them. Several of them also became professional in their gardening, deliberately creating a world of light and colour in order to paint it. Glass cases contain horticultural publications of the kind they consulted.

They were certainly not the first artist-gardeners, however. Henry Raeburn was a great gardener, for instance, and artists had painted gardens since the middle ages. Even the Romans were great garden painters. Constable painted them and most recently so did the Pre-Raphaelites. Before Monet, Ford Madox Brown painted his wife and child in the open air in his garden at Hampstead. He imported sheep as additional models. He complained that they ate the flowers. Nevertheless, the close symbiosis between painting and gardening of the Impressionists was new. Excepting the 17th century in Holland, so too is the treatment of the garden itself as an extension of the private space of the house and a natural subject for painting, though, like their preference for suburban living, that does mark these artists as distinctly bourgeois. Perhaps that is part of their unfailing popularity; bourgeois ourselves, we recognise the affinity.

The thesis that gardens are an integral part of Impressionism is well made with some lovely pictures. As well as those I have cited, there is a beautiful croquet match by Manet and a wonderful still life of flowers by Renoir. There are some unfamiliar Czannes and two splendid Van Goghs. One is of a garden brilliantly in bloom, though Van Gogh was no gardener. Berthe Morisot certainly had a garden and there is a small but beautiful picture by her of her daughter Julie among the hollyhocks.

Pierre Bonnard was a great garden painter and there are two big paintings by him. But Bonnard was hardly an Impressionist. To include him takes the story well into the 20th century. Indeed the latest picture here dates from 1936, but that also bypasses so much. Theo van Rhysselberghe and Henry Martin are followers of Georges Seurat, for instance. Both are included, but otherwise Seurat's enormous influence is absent. At the other extreme, the earliest picture is from the 1820s in a section called Towards Impressionism as though it was an inevitable destiny for all art. A superb Delacroix still life and a lovely Corot are included here, but there are some pretty clunky pictures too.

For all the wonderful loans, the exhibition might have been twice as good had it been half as big. It casts the Impressionist net so wide that it includes Belgian, German, American, Italian, Spanish and even Scottish painters. Some of them are barely Impressionists by any definition.

Ernest Quost's Morning Flowers, for instance, is nice enough, but it's a Salon picture. Fritz Schilder's Public Gardens may owe a debt to Manet, but it is untouched by Impressionist colour. Marco Calderini's Winter Sadness, a wet park in Turin in winter, is even further off the point.

Lon Frdric's The Fragrant Air, a child among roses, is pretty awful and more like Albert Moore than any Impressionist. Tissot's Holyday is the same. It is a Victorian narrative picture. Girls and young men idle among the picnic things. An out-of-season fur coat suggests kinky games. It has not much to do with gardens and even less with Impressionism, unless it is a sly take on Manet's Le djeuner sur l'herbe; the scene before the girl undresses for the benefit of her male companions.

American painter Frederick Childe Hassam's Gathering Flowers in a French Garden is not fit company for Monet's lovely Garden at Argenteuil hanging beside it. Monet himself is badly let down by a late picture that ought to have been suppressed to preserve his reputation. It all reminds you that the Impressionists were not great because they were Impressionists. Indeed they were scarcely unified by a style. They were a small group of remarkably talented artists, but their undoubted influence was not a magic wand that transformed all those touched by it.

If Impressionism seems a bit of a muddle, it is the same with gardens. Having set up the intriguing idea of the Impressionist garden, the exhibition dilutes it with paintings of public parks and all sorts of semi-garden spots. You end up wondering what is meant by a garden and indeed what exactly is meant by Impressionism. The exhibition also looks crowded when it should look light and airy. In a show of this kind it should never be necessary to double hang. Nevertheless, if I have reservations about the structure of the whole, some of the parts are marvellous. There are a lot of lovely pictures here.

lUntil 17 October