Art review: Impressionists in full bloom

Published on Friday 23 July 2010 12:06

IF A curator were to dream up the perfect summer exhibition, it might look something like this: Impressionist paintings of gardens, covering the walls with soft-focus sunlight and flowers.

• Charles Courtney Curran's Lotus Lilies is part of the summer show. Picture: Complimentary

Uniting the public's favourite art movement with one of our society's most popular hobbies would seem to be guaranteed box office.

There seems little doubt that Impressionist Gardens, the major summer show at the National Galleries of Scotland, will be a blockbuster, bringing together as it does almost 100 works loaned by collections around the world. But it promises to be much more than an art world equivalent of Chelsea Flower Show.

"It's not just about pretty chocolate box pictures, although some of them are that," says curator Michael Clarke, director of the National Gallery of Scotland. "There's much more to it."

Beneath its blossoming exterior, the roots of this show branch in surprising directions, taking in social history and even a bit of politics. The idea for the exhibition came from Dr Clare Willsdon, Clarke's co-curator, an art historian from the University of Glasgow who wrote a book on the subject several years ago.

It is the first time the subject has been addressed in a major exhibition, which is surprising because the pairing of artists and subject matter seems such a natural one - where better than a garden for a painter to study the play of light and shade, or the aesthetics of colour?

But the concept is much more radical than it looks: as well as using paint in a new and controversial way, the Impressionists deliberately forsook the traditional genres of painting - history, religious, mythological - to paint the contemporary life they saw around them. Baudelaire called them "painters of modern life" and gardens were a crucial part of what it meant to be modern.

In the second half of the 19th century, Paris had been remodeled as a state-of-the-art modern city, replete with public gardens. The bourgeoisie would take the air fashionably in these agreeable surroundings. It was the height of style.

Having a garden of one's own was also a growing phenomenon. For the first time, middle-class people were discovering the joys of tending their own patch of earth. Horticultural societies grew up by the hundred, seed catalogues and gardening journals were published to meet the growing demand. And for the first time, artists were also becoming gardeners.

It is remarkable how many of the paintings in the exhibition show a garden which is the artist's own. Monet painted his garden at Argenteuil, then Vetheuil, and most famously at Giverny. Renoir's iconic Woman with Parasol in a Garden was painted in the half-wild garden behind his studio in Montmartre. Berthe Morisot, painting while raising her children, made use of subject matter close at hand in her garden.

Clarke says: "A garden is your own little world, your own realm of safety where you and your family live and enjoy each other's company. It's a corner of nature created by you rather than God, in keeping with the more secular approach to life around at that time, post-Darwin."

Some took the ideological approach still further, painting market and vegetable gardens. Pissarro, in particular, painted peasants at work on their own plots.

"Pissarro was fairly left-wing in his interests," says Clarke. "I think some of those images do reflect his ideology. They are about the nobility of man's labour, the value of work rather than capital."

Monet's interests lay more with plants than ideology. Even comparatively early paintings of his garden at Argenteuil in the 1870s show that he was growing exotic plants. Clarke comments: "You can tell right away from these images that already, although he's a man of modest means, he's deeply interested in gardens. When he moves to Vetheuil, yes, it's a nice cheap house for the family but right across the road, leading down to the Seine, there's a nice garden.

"Then, at Giverny, he creates a very, very ambitious garden. By the end he has a gardening staff of six. There are Japanese bridges, lily ponds, greenhouses, it's a great garden by any standards."

It is at Giverny that he painted his much celebrated images of waterlilies, which are among the most recognisable images in the history of flower painting, ubiquitous on posters, mugs, placemats. But Clarke says: "There's no substitute for seeing the real thing. Something you think you know from reproduction always looks different."

And he adds: "At the moment, the pictures are arriving for the exhibition, and each day it's like opening a present when they come out of the crate. Even though I've seen many of them before there's always a surprise."

He emphasises that less than 25 per cent of the pictures in the show would be considered "familiar". The curators have included a variety of artists who were influenced by the Impressionists in Spain, Germany, Austria and the United States. "Visitors are going to see a lot of artists they haven't ever seen before."

As the 20th century dawned, the ideas which flowered in the garden paintings of mature Impressionism would go on to grow in new directions: Post-Impressionist Bonnard painted Resting in the Garden, a family group dozing in the high afternoon sun; Gustav Klimt became fascinated by the patterns in flowers, and Belfast-born John Lavery painted his garden in Morocco, a piece which is now in a private collection and rarely exhibited.

And Monet was still at Giverny, painting increasingly abstract images of his garden; beautiful, immersive, radical pictures which seemed to speak to the future of painting rather than its past. Late in life, he is reputed to have wondered whether the garden at Giverny was, after all, his greatest creation. The evidence on his canvases disputes that.

• Impressionist Gardens is at the National Gallery Complex, The Mound, Edinburgh, 31 July until 17 October.