Not being immune to the slow but inevitable process of turning into one’s parents, I have recently become interested in gardening. Years of blissful indifference, and now I’m reading more books about gardens than art. So the RA’s show ‘Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse’ potentially held double the usual interest to me. But I was skeptical about the show; nothing pulls the crowds like an impressionism exhibition, and combine it with gardens and you’ve drawn in a whole secondary audience. You can hear the coffers being filled. So the fact that I enjoyed the show so much softened the cynic in me.
Monet looms large throughout the exhibition. First and last are his paintings, and his whole approach to being a gardener-painter is a model all others seem to follow. The exhibition starts with a coup by the curators, hanging Renoir’s picture of Monet painting his garden next to the very painting Monet must have been working on. Monet’s is the superior, the end of day light in which the dashes of bright blooms still shine, it evokes everything that is charming about cottage gardens in the summer. How can I paint such evocative pictures, I thought, and how can I make the mud patch behind my house that nice? The Renoir is one of (very) few pictures of his which I actually like (I’m more of the “Renoir sucks at painting” persuasion), but given how similar the colours are I can’t help thinking he kept having a look at Monet’s canvas in progress. Anyway, these early-ish Monets are completely charming, not at all showy, simple in their honest observation of the true colours seen outdoors.
Monet looms large throughout the exhibition. First and last are his paintings, and his whole approach to being a gardener-painter is a model all others seem to follow. The exhibition starts with a coup by the curators, hanging Renoir’s picture of Monet painting his garden next to the very painting Monet must have been working on. Monet’s is the superior, the end of day light in which the dashes of bright blooms still shine, it evokes everything that is charming about cottage gardens in the summer. How can I paint such evocative pictures, I thought, and how can I make the mud patch behind my house that nice? The Renoir is one of (very) few pictures of his which I actually like (I’m more of the “Renoir sucks at painting” persuasion), but given how similar the colours are I can’t help thinking he kept having a look at Monet’s canvas in progress. Anyway, these early-ish Monets are completely charming, not at all showy, simple in their honest observation of the true colours seen outdoors.
Pissarro, one time resident of my corner of South East London, is perhaps the only painter in the show with an interest in depicting the work of gardening, and generally in the unromantic kitchen garden. With a surprisingly limited tonal range his pictures glowed. As someone used to studio painting, where you use darks to make the lights shine, I’m intrigued at how he does this. In fact some pictures, like one of Caillebotte’s fail specifically because they push the tonal range too far. Something to figure out still. The humble beauty of the Pissarros appealed to me, not least as I’m currently making tentative steps with an idea of painting some local allotments, which happen to be a short potter from an area he painted.
Pissarro
One of the things that struck me in the rooms that followed is quite how varied in mood and even meaning the good paintings were. I had sort of expected them all to have the same happy serenity of those first Monets. you know the feeling, that “ah isn’t it nice to be among all the pretty flowers” feeling. It’s not deep and profound, and it’s sort of fine with that because the flowers are very pretty. The bad paintings (and to be honest, there are plenty in the show) such as the kitchy Alfred Parsons and James Tissot, the disappointingly photographic P.S. Kroyer all had that same mood in a very shallow way. But the better ones were diverse in mood and meaning.
Take Sorolla for instance. A total master of colour. The ferocious energy in his enormous portrait of Louis Comfort Tiffany gives more a sense of the focused work of the painter (one can’t help but think the subject is really a stand in for Sorolla himself) perceiving the subtleties of colour in full saturation. It’s exuberant and showy in the best possible sense. His pictures of his courtyard garden tie him to his land and culture. The moorish influence is felt in his garden design, and the garden acts as a cool retreat in the hot sun. The order and structure of the garden design is softened by the plants that grow in it and the dappled shadows that move across.
Take Sorolla for instance. A total master of colour. The ferocious energy in his enormous portrait of Louis Comfort Tiffany gives more a sense of the focused work of the painter (one can’t help but think the subject is really a stand in for Sorolla himself) perceiving the subtleties of colour in full saturation. It’s exuberant and showy in the best possible sense. His pictures of his courtyard garden tie him to his land and culture. The moorish influence is felt in his garden design, and the garden acts as a cool retreat in the hot sun. The order and structure of the garden design is softened by the plants that grow in it and the dappled shadows that move across.
Sorolla's huge portrait 150 x 225 cm
Sorolla's garden, well worth a visit if you're in Madrid
A complete contrast is made with Santiago Rusiñol. Not a household name, he’s not not the level of Sorolla and Monet, but I liked his sombre pictures. Sad about the neglect of many palace gardens, he paints them as requiems for a Spain that’s lost or losing its global eminence. Deep shadows from high hedges and formal planting, the gardens are uninhabited. Usually autumnal, the light is always at the end of the day, but not in the restful way Monet paints, but rather in a foreboding way.
Henri Martin’s pointillist impressionism is by no means groundbreaking, but it’s effective. His earlier imaginative Giotto-inspired work gave way to more straightforward landscape painting when he escaped the city of Paris and moved to a remote village in the Lot valley and spent the rest of his life mostly painting that village, his garden, and occasionally a village down the road. Within that small area he captured different light effects and moods. But the overarching feeling is one of rejuvenation in nature. The anxiety of the city gives way to the simple pleasure of watching the seasons change with all their different colour palettes. Escapism? Certainly. I’d say that’s one of the chief pleasures of a garden.
A couple of Martin self portraits (not in the show). A master of many moods.
.The garden is a space onto which the inner life is projected, whether that is melancholy or celebratory. For Les Nabis post-impressionists, the fact that trees and plants are (or seem) unchanging over the centuries means they transpose imagined narratives into the garden. In Maurice Denis and Edouard Vuillard’s images of women in the garden, they abandon a realist approach and so allow the primitivism to evoke both earlier art and earlier times. They feel like a sort of mythic biblical garden, be it Eden, the garden in Song of Songs or paradise itself. Imagination is stronger than observation. They have a charm, which depending on my mood I quite like. but then the exhibition returns to Monet and I remember why my first love is painting which responds to observation.
Giverny, Monet’s garden and muse is the subject of the rest of the exhibition. Two things struck me in these last two three rooms. Firstly, the way Monet continued to push himself for his whole life. Celebrated and successful, he could have spent his days painting happy pictures of sunny landscapes to go above peoples sofas (nothing particularly wrong with that I might add). But he developed new approaches all the time. His water lily pictures are a fascinating middle point between realism and abstraction. I don’t see them as a transition point between the two as some art historians like to, but they are simultaneously both. The mood, and colour, feels completely observed. It rings true in a way only observation based painting does. And yet, by removing the horizon something interesting happens. You become more aware of the painting as a surface. Monet’s technique always allowed the paint surface to play a big part, but here it goes to a new level. Rather than the traditional effect of a landscape, which is to create depth and space, it is resolutely flattened. He is painting a flat surface (water) on a flat surface (canvas). yet there is depth on this flat surface, as what we see is largely the reflection of what is cropped out of the composition. There are little hints at reeds etc below the surface of the water, and suggestions of what might be being reflected above, but the only concrete forms are those lilies which sit flat on the surface. They’re sophisticated without ever becoming ‘about’ this play between flatness and depth. Their primary effect is that of beautiful light and colour, and the moods they create. Is that abstraction or is that reality, or both?
One other way he casually threw in a whole new approach to landscape painting, was painting corners of his garden life sized. It only just occurred to me looking at his 2m square canvas of a daylily, he’s painting his garden on the scale of life. By reducing the depth depicted, there’s no perspective, so everything is fully seen to scale. With his giant water lily pictures they become immersive. It’s imax in paint. While the battles of the Great War raged around France, Monet resolutely battled on with painting in new and ever more ambitious ways. Seeing it as his patriotic duty to do so, he intended for his huge waterlily canvases to be put on public display, owned by the nation (get thee to L’Orangerie in Paris to see the best of them). The catalogue writes of Monet’s “deeply felt need to find beauty to counter ugliness, joy to overcome sorrow, life to defeat death”, his paintings of the garden “leave a collective testament to the subject’s enduring power to inspire spiritual rejuvenation”. Seeing the exhibition in Spring, just after Easter, I believe it.
A l'Orangerie