From Manet's earliest depictions of the Tuileries Gardens in Paris to Monet's late waterlilies painted at Giverny, the Impressionists had an ongoing love affair with gardens. As places of rest, relaxation, and beauty, gardens were the Impressionist subject par excellence. This beautifully illustrated volume is the first consideration of this beloved theme in the Impressionists' work. Here the artists' fascination with gardens, parks, and flowers is explored in the context of the contemporary craze for horticulture and the changing political and cultural landscape in France. Drawing on archival sources such as horticultural journals as well as literature, poetry, and correspondence, the book describes how gardens, simultaneously modern and imbued with nostalgia, were central to the Impressionists' discovery of their distinctive plein-air (out-of-doors) style. At the same time, by bringing to life the 19th-century tradition of ?oral symbolism and exploring how it infiltrated the work of key Impressionists, the book gives familiar works radical new interpretations. This vital contribution to our understanding of the Impressionist world is sure to delight art and gardening enthusiasts alike.

A beautiful exploration of the rich history and striking evolution of Impressionist garden paintings.

A compilation of paintings (of gardens) by Impressionist artists. A popular subject for artists such as Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley, their work captures their celebration of fresh air, of greenery and of colourful settings on a domestic scale.

Derek Fell offers 25 full-color plans to inspire amateur gardeners with modest-size gardens to re-create glimmering planting schemes--both those the Impressionists envisioned on canvas and those they created in reality. The accent throughout is on the practical and achievable. Full-color photographs.

'Impressionists in Their Gardens' explores gardens through the senses of the Impressionists from three continents - Europe, North America and Australia - enjoying the essentially similar pleasures of the garden, but engaging with the light from their skies in order to create very different sensations. The enclosure of the garden acts like a picture frame showcasing a living canvas that exudes the individuality, vision and taste of its tenants, their family, friends, lifestyles and, in the simple words of the greatest Impressionist and gardener Monet, providing motifs to paint. The first section uses contemporary paintings and photographs to see the who, what and where of Impressionist gardens - planting, eating, loving, sleeping, children, animals, working and painting. The second section, illustrated with paintings, old photographs and modern images, starts at the horticultural source - the nurseryman Latour-Marliac at Temple sur Lot, then Monet at Giverny; American Impressionists at Old Lyme, Cos Cob and Appledore in the USA; Gertrude Jekyll at Munstead Wood and beyond; the Heidelburg School and Frederick McCubbin at Fontainebleau; and, chronologically last but not least, Renoir at Les Colettes. Caroline Holmes' travels have enabled her to take this unique approach, as a garden historian and gardener she understands how weather has shaped and formed the earth's sublime topography and how the control of the human hand is beautifully displayed in its fine crafted gardens, observed and colourfully captured by these artists. Join her in the garden for the great pleasures of solitude and sociability; food and friendship; sound and scent; cool shade and balmy warmth, not forgetting glorious colour. 200 colour illustrations

The spectacular transformation of Paris during the 19th century into a city of tree-lined boulevards and public parks both redesigned the capital and inspired the era’s great Impressionist artists. The renewed landscape gave crowded, displaced urban dwellers green spaces to enjoy, while suburbanites and country-dwellers began cultivating their own flower gardens. As public engagement with gardening grew, artists increasingly featured flowers and parks in their work. Public Parks, Private Gardens includes masterworks by artists such as Bonnard, Cassatt, Cézanne, Corot, Daumier, Van Gogh, Manet, Matisse, Monet, and Seurat. Many of these artists were themselves avid gardeners, and they painted parks and gardens as the distinctive scenery of contemporary life. Writing from the perspective of both a distinguished art historian and a trained landscape designer, Colta Ives provides new insights not only into these essential works, but also into this extraordinarily creative period in France’s history.

At the end of the nineteenth century, American artists demonstrated a preference for gardens as artistic motifs as well as a growing appreciation of the art of gardening itself. The range of color and the variation in form and silhouette made the garden a compelling subject for a large number of painters inclined toward the Impressionist style. Early twentieth-century America witnessed a mania for the garden, and the interest in the art of gardening dominated many aspects of domestic life. Publications and articles offered gardening advice for Americans, while also asserting that the art of gardening paralleled the art of painting. The exhibition catalog The American Impressionists in the Garden explores the theme of the garden in American art and society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. May Brawley Hill's essay discusses a range of themes, including the Impressionist fascination for gardens, the history of garden design, comparisons between European and American garden paintings, images of women, and the art colony movement, as well as providing detailed readings of the specific gardens painted and cultivated by these artists. Besides the forty-four color plates depicting European and American gardens by American artists, the catalog includes some historic photographs of artists in garden settings. These allow the reader to examine the relationship between the garden as photographed and the garden as painted. The catalog looks at garden paintings from Holland, France, Italy, and England and from different regions in the United States, including the Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, and West Coast. Garden sculpture was an essential element of garden design, and the catalog also features images of a number of small-scale bronzes and other statuary for garden environments. This book has been developed to accompany a 2010 exhibition at Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art.