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.

Inspired by European impressionist paintings of open countryside, private gardens, and urban parks, American artists working in the years between 1887 and 1920 turned their attentions to the new landscapes being created in the fast-changing cities and rapidly emerging suburbs of their own country. Up and down the eastern seaboard, a middle-class idyll was brought to life with the construction of railways, trams, and parkways that connected city centers to commuter suburbs, whose inhabitants increasingly turned to gardening as a leisure—and predominantly female—pursuit. "The two arts of painting and garden design are closely related," landscape architect Beatrix Farrand wrote in 1907, "except that the landscape gardener paints with actual color, line, and perspective to make a composition . . . while the painter has but a flat surface on which to create his illusion." The Artist's Garden tells the intertwined stories of American art and the new American garden movement in the years on either side of the turn of the twentieth century. Anna O. Marley and her contributors showcase more than one hundred beautifully reproduced artworks by Cecilia Beaux, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, and others alongside the books, journals, and ephemeral artifacts that both shaped and were products of the garden movement. The volume's lavishly illustrated text considers topics that range from environmentalism to new printing technologies, from the genres of garden writing to the distinctions between public and domestic spaces or American and French impressionism. Employing the interdisciplinary perspectives of horticultural and art history, The Artist's Garden places special emphasis on the mid-Atlantic region as the epicenter of a national garden movement and offers a new look into the impact of impressionism not on American painting alone, but on the nation's culture at large. Contributors: Alan C. Braddock, James Glisson, John Dixon Hunt, Erin Leary, Anna O. Marley, Katie A. Pfohl, Judith B. Tankard, Virginia Grace Tuttle.

The Artist’s Garden offers an intriguing study into 20 gardens that have inspired and been home to some of the greatest painters of history. The most alluring image of an artist at work is surely one where he or she has come out of their studio, set up their easel on the garden path, pulled on a hat to shade their eyes from the sun and taken their brush and palette in hand. This sumptuously illustrated and fascinating book delves into the stories behind the gardens which inspired some of the most beautiful and important works of art. These gardens not only supplied the inspiration for creative works but also illuminate the professional motivation and private life of the artists themselves – from Cezanne’s house in the south of France to Childe Hassam at Celia Thaxter’s garden off the coast off Maine. Flowers and gardens have often been the first choice for artists looking for a subject. A garden close to the artist’s studio is not only convenient for daily material and ideas, but also has the advantage of changing through the seasons and over time. Claude Monet’s Giverny was the catalyst for hundreds of great paintings (by Monet and other artists), each one different from the one before. Sometimes a whole village becomes the focus for a colony of artists as at Gerberoy in Picardy and Skagen on the northernmost tip of Denmark. This book is about the real homes and gardens that inspired these great artists – gardens that can still be visited today. The relationship between artist and garden is a complex one. A few artists, including Pierre Bonnard and his neighbour Monet were keen gardeners, as much in love with their plants as their work, while for others like Sorolla in Madrid, his courtyard home was both a sanctuary and a source of ideas. This book is as unmissable for art lovers as it is for anyone who knows the joy of time spent in gardens, offering an intriguing insight into the lives of these great painters and the gardens which inspired them to their creative heights.

An examination of the continuities and differences between American Impressionism and Realism. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Taking its lead from French artists like Renoir and Monet, the American impressionist movement followed its own path which over a forty-year period reveals as much about America as a nation as it does about its art as a creative power-house. It's a story closely tied to a love of gardens and a desire to preserve nature in a rapidly urbanizing nation. Travelling to studios, gardens and iconic locations throughout the United States, UK and France, this mesmerising film is a feast for the eyes. In 1886, the French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel brought a selection of his huge stock of impressionist paintings to New York, changing the course of art in America forever. American artists flocked to the French village of Giverny, home to the master impressionist Claude Monet, and cheered the French new wave: painting outdoors with a new found brilliance and vitality. As Europe recoiled against the work of Monet, Degas and Renoir, Americans embraced it and created their own style of impressionism. The timing of Durand-Ruel's transformative visit was perfect. As America steamed into the Industrial Age, urban reformers fought to create public parks and gardens: patches of beauty amid smokestacks and ash heaps. These gardens provided unlimited inspiration for artists and a never-ending oasis for the growing middle class, made up of increasingly independent women, who relished the writings of English horticulturalists Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson. Meanwhile the rise of wide-circulation magazines cultivated the idea that gardening was a path to spiritual renewal amid industrial blight and the belief that artists should work in native landscapes. As America made its epic move from a nation of farmers to a land of factories, the pioneering American Impressionists crafted a sumptuous visual language that told the story of an era.

"This illustrated publication accompanies a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, the first retrospective presentation of Hassam's work in a museum since 1972. Unique to this volume are an account of Hassam's lifelong campaign to market his art, a study of the frames he selected and designed for his paintings, and an unprecedented lifetime exhibition record. Included in addition are a checklist of works in the exhibition and a chronology of Hassam's life. All works in the exhibition as well as comparative materials are reproduced."--BOOK JACKET.