Review: Chelsea Physic Garden: Celebrating 350 Years in Paint and Print

Yesterday I visited Chelsea Physic Garden: Celebrating 350 Years in Paint and Print at the Bankside Gallery on the South Bank.

Dicotyledon Beds, Chelsea Physic Garden by Claire Denny

collage, gouache & ink

Frame: 45 x 45 cm | Artwork: 29 x 29 cm

SOLD

It's a very good exhibition of the diverse perspectives of different by selected artist members of the Royal Watercolour Society (RWS) and Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE).

The exhibition is being held to mark the 350th anniversary of the Chelsea Physic Garden.

View of the exhibition at the Bankside Gallery

There was a previous collaborative exhibition in 2021 - Chelsea Physic Garden: A Year in the Life. This came about as a result of an invitation from the Chelsea Physic Garden for artists to visit the garden and create art as a result

Over the course of the last 18 months, the artists have researched, visited (when possible) and recorded the Garden throughout changing seasons and varying restrictions, documenting perhaps one of the most extraordinary years of the Garden’s life. The result is a compelling and vibrant display of creativity and a wonderful example of what can be achieved in the face of adversity. The exhibition is truly refreshing and uplifting; a reminder of the joys and healing powers of both art and nature.

The initiative which started in 2019 was interrupted by the Pandemic. However at the same time it resulted in a greater understanding of the value of the garden.

You can also read: The Healing Powers of Art and Nature: Chelsea Physic Garden through the eyes of artists

I highly recommend a visit to the exhibition for those who like painting (or printmaking) gardens - or just enjoy Chelsea Physic Garden which is a delightful, historic and informative oasis in Chelsea - next to the river.

The exhibition banner on an external view of the Bankside Gallery

Paintings in the Exhibition - Two Painters

You can see an album of my gallery shots of the exhibition on my Facebook Page - see Chelsea Physic Garden 350th Anniversary - which are receiving some very positive responses from those who have viewed them. Believe me - they're better in real life!

View of the exhibition

I'm a Friend of the Florilegium Society based at Chelsea Physic Garden and am very familiar with the garden. Members of the Florilegium Society all draw and paint the plants rather than the garden.  (READ my page about Florilegium Societies to find out more about what they do). 

It was therefore very interesting to see the different ways in which the RWS and RE artists tackled the subject of the garden.

I'm going to highlight the artists who I thought best captured the look and spirit and history of the garden

Gardens in Art: Monet and Argenteuil

Women in the Garden, 1866
Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926)
Oil on canvas; 10 1/16 x 8 1/16 in. (25.5 x 20.5 cm)
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Monet is forever associated with the garden at Giverny. However some of the most famous Impressionist paintings of gardens are associated with the time Monet spent at Argenteuil.

Monet established a theme early in his career for painting landscape and leisure activities. He was also used to painting 'en plein air' (painting outdoors in the open air).

His first large scale work of note is Women in the Garden 1866.

Monet's devotion to painting out of doors is illustrated by the famous story concerning one of his most ambitious early works, Women in the Garden (Musée d'Orsay, Paris; 1866-67). The picture is about 2.5 meters high and to enable him to paint all of it outside he had a trench dug in the garden so that the canvas could be raised or lowered by pulleys to the height he required. Courbet visited him when he was working on it and said Monet would not paint even the leaves in the background unless the lighting conditions were exactly right.
WebMuseum - Monet

Now I know studying the masters helps all of us to think about different ways of approaching our art - but I wasn't expecting that one!

The Salon rejected this work. Apparently being a known associate of Manet who had already scandalised Paris with Le déjeuner sur l'herbe also did not help.

The composition of the three young women in the painting followed the academic manners of the day. However, while the patterns on the women';s dresses carried the fine detail of a photograph, Monet left the breeze blown blossoms and the starry buttercups and daisies in the foreground vague and impressionistic. These flowers, the dappled play of light on the overhanging tress and the sense of being out of doors on a feisty spring afternoon combined to make "Femmes au Jardin" an uncoventional picture.
Bill Laws Artists' Gardens

According to Debra Mancoff in her book 'Monet's Garden in Art', Zola was writing art criticism at the time and the painting caught his eye. He praised Monet and his colleague for painting life precisely as they saw it rather than according to conventional ideals. He considered it entirely appropriate that artists should be painting modern day subjects as part of contemporary art.

After the rejection by the Salon, Monet and his friends decided to join forces to become more independent of the Salon and to set up a separate exhibition. As a result, their way of painting was eventually called 'Impressionism'.

Returning to France, Monet moved first to Argenteuil, just fifteen minutes from Paris by train, then west to Vétheuil, Poissy, and finally to the more rural Giverny in 1883. His homes and gardens became gathering places for friends, including Manet and Renoir, who often painted alongside their host (1976.201.14). Yet Monet's paintings cast a surprisingly objective eye on these scenes, which include few signs of domestic relations.
Metropolitan Museum of Art - Claude Monet - Timeline

In 1870, Monet rented a house in the suburb of Argenteuil. He began to garden and to paint in his garden. Monet was also painted by other Impressionist painters in his garden at Argenteuil. These included Manet and Renoir. You can see a description of the arrangement in this narrative produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to accompany the Manet painting of the Monet Family in their garden at Argenteuil.



Monet painting in his garden at Argenteuil, 1873
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste
Oil on canvas, 46 x 60 cm
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford

The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil, 1874
Édouard Manet (French, 1832–1883)
Oil on canvas; 24 x 39 1/4 in. (61 x 99.7 cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bequest of Joan Whitney Payson, 1975 (1976.201.14)

Monet's paintings atArgenteuil are of domesticity, family, friends and flowers. Apparently Monet recalled years later that the garden soothed him during difficult times and became a refuge when he was tending his plants. For him working at his easel in his own garden merged his various loves.

Here are some of the paintings he produced. - the Artist's Garden at Argenteuil and Camille Monet and a Child in the Artist's garden at Argenteuil (1875). Camille, his wife, died in 1879

Camille Monet and a Child in the Artist's Garden in Argenteuil, 1875
Claude Monet, French, 1840–1926
Oil on canvas, 55.3 x 64.7 cm (21 3/4 x 25 1/2 in.)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

In (1873) he painted Camille in the garden six times. This was the first time that the garden, which became such an all-domnating subject for Monet's later work, featured as an important living environment. It was where the family passed the time, a place of social encounters and a workshop. The garden was both public and intimate. Art and life entered into a happy association that gave birth to a new type of picture beyond the genres of portrait, landscape and still life in Monet's work - the garden picture
Mareike Hennig in The Painter's Garden

Monet's Approach - Suggested Learning Points

Monet's approach to painting gardens at this stage involved:

• painting from life outdoors and in the open air - note that this does not equate to painting 'alla prima' (finishing a painting in one session)
• painting in natural light and only when the light is right
  
• making adjustments in order to paint on a big canvas
  
• a contemporary emphasis on objective painting of modern subjects and life as he saw it rather than conventional ideals - and the development of a new genre associated with painting in the garden ("the garden picture") eg
  
• painting friends in the garden
• painting wives and children in the garden
  
• painting each other as artists in the garden
  

Do please comment if you feel there are learning points which should be added or whether any of those suggested should be discussed further.

Links:

• Wikipedia:
• Impressionism
• En plein air
  
• Metropolitan Museum of Art
  
• Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art
  
• Web Museum
• Claud Monet - Resources for Art Lovers
• Making A Mark: Gardens in Art continues with Monet
  

A visit to the Chelsea Physic Garden

Staying in Chelsea, after my visit to Green & Stone, I went to see the Chelsea Physic Garden which lies in between the River Thames and the Chelsea Embankment and Royal Hospital Road.

It's a real haven of peace as well as being a wonderful garden for artists interested in botanical art.

The Chelsea Physic Garden was founded by the Society of Apothecaries in 1673 in order to promote the study of botany in relation to medicine, then known as the "physic" or healing arts. As the second oldest botanic garden in England it still fulfils the traditional functions of scientific research and plant conservation and undertakes to educate and inform as well as to provide the amenity of a walled "secret" garden in the heart of London.

You can read about more about the Workshipful Society of Apothecaries on their website.

The word 'apothecary' is derived from apotheca, meaning a place where wine, spices and herbs were stored. During the thirteenth century it came into use in this country to describe a person who kept a stock of these commodities, which he sold from his shop or street stall....By the mid-sixteenth century apothecaries had become the equivalent of today's community pharmacists, dealing mainly with the preparation and sale of substances for medicinal purposes.
Origins and History of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries

The emphasis of the garden was and is very much on plants and health. Latterly the renewed interest in natural' remedies means that there is more interest in the Chelsea Physic Garden. Besides the order beds found in botanic gardens, the garden has also developed

• a pharmaceutical garden which has a display of plants which yield therapeutic compounds of proven value in current medicinal practice and are in world-wide use today.
• a Garden of World Medicine. This is when I found out what an ethnobotanical display means . Basically it means a display of plants used for medicinal and healing purposes by a wide variety of peoples.
  

The Chelsea Physic Garden Florilegium Society was formed by a small groups of botanical artists in 1995, with the primary aim of recording in paintings and drawings, the plants growing in the Physic Garden.

More than 5,000 plants are listed in the Garden's collection which makes it an extremely challenging project to portray the Garden's entire collection. Over 200 watercolours and 120 drawings have currently been accepted and in effect the work to complete the Florilegiun and has only just started.

The Florilegium Society started from a small groups of students who had just completed the first ever botanical illustration course run by the English Gardening School, which is linked to the Chelsea Physic Garden. Most of the classes at The English Gardening School are held at the Chelsea Physic Garden. The School provides:

• short courses in botanical painting - including drawing with pen and ink
• a diploma course in botanical painting. The course leans towards the artistic recording of plants rather than the strictly scientific and is open to all those who are interested in learning to paint plants botanically. Fay Ballard, whose work I very much admire and who has contributed work to the Highgrove Florilegium, has completed this diploma course.
  

I was very struck by the number of 'spike' plants in the garden - hence the theme of my photos. What I was also struck by was how many different plants were contained in what is a relatively small space compared to most botanical gardens. It seemed as if there was something new to look at with every step around the garden.

Visiting times: The Garden is open on Wednesdays, Thursday, Fridays, Sundays and Bank Holidays from noon between 19 March - 31 October and has an entrance charge. It's open later in the evening on Wednesdays during July and August. The main entrance, which is a little difficult to spot, is at 66 Royal Hospital Road.

The area around the Physic Garden is ripe with other buildings which have topical and/or historical associations - so if you plan on visiting make sure to allow time for loitering, and maybe having lunch...........

• Right next door, at 68-69 Royal Hospital Road is Restaurant Gordon Ramsay!
  
• I also walked past Dante Gabriel Rossetti's house at 16 Cheyne Walk on my way to the garden
  
• on my way back to Sloane Square, I did a detour down Tite Street past John Singer Sargent's house and studio at No. 31 - where all the fashionable ladies and gents came to have their portraits painted!
  

Next time I visit I think I might do the Chelsea Walk as detailed in the Virtual Museum created by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

I'm currently thinking of revisiting the garden next week before I go to the Chelsea Flower Show - I've got my ticket for next Wednesday!

(L) Dante Gabriel Rossetti's house in Cheyne Walk
(R) John Singer Sargent's home and studio in Tite Street

Links:

• Chelsea Physic Garden
• Google Maps - 66 Hospital Road
• RBKC - Virtual Museum - Chelsea Walk
  
• Chelsea Physic Garden
• Tite Street
• Cheyne Walk
• Cheyne Walk 1-30
• Chelsea Embankment
  

Review: 'London's Secret Garden' Exhibition at the Chelsea Physic Garden

This week I visited the London's Secret Garden exhibition which celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Florilegium Society at the Chelsea Physic Garden.

a corner of the exhibition - with the exhibition banner

This is a very long post and comprises:

• a review of the exhibition - highlighting work by specific artists
• an account of how the Chelsea Physic Garden Florilegium Society works - and how to become a member
• the key facts about the Chelsea Physic Garden - and why it's a great place to visit (between 1 April to 31 October).

'London's Secret Garden' (4th - 26th August 2015) 

The exhibition includes 75 artworks by 73 artist members past and present. Most are watercolour paintings however there is also pen and ink and the use of graphite and coloured pencils.

The exhibition opened on Tuesday and runs until Wednesday 26th August and can be viewed between 11am and 4pm. Entrance to the exhibition is free with entry to the garden.

A number of the paintings are also included in a book Botanical Illustration from Chelsea Physic Garden by Andrew Brown (Past Chairman of the Society) -  which has been produced to commemorate the 20th Anniversary. (I'll be writing a separate review of this). A similar book was produced for the tenth anniversary and now sells for enormous prices - if you can get hold of a copy!

Ribes rubrum by Sally Vincent and  Fuschia procumbens by Mayumi Hashi
The painting on the left is the one chosen for the front cover of the book

The book focuses in particular on angiosperms (plants with flowers and seeds enclosed in fruits).

Views of the exhibition

I have to emphasise that there's an awful lot I could say about this exhibition - and one of the reasons for the delay in posting has been the need to keep editing myself!

My main recommendation to all botanical artists is to go and see this exhibition.

For all those who love plants and flowers it's also very much seeing - both in terms of what you will learn about the plants and because it's an exhibition which has grown out of the garden in which you can see it.

The overall standard of artwork overall is very good and to my mind it's a better exhibition than the last one one in 2013. Some of them are really excellent and that's unsurprising given many of the artists have been painting botanical art for many years and have won medals for it!

The exhibition is hung on grey exhibition panels (like the ones used by the RHS). Below you can see some views of the exhibition and its artwork.

Watercolour paintings by Amanda Ward, Janet Callender and a drawing by John Bell
Janet's painting of the foxglove tree from China is on the back cover of the book.

I was trying to discern a pattern to the way the different plants were hung but couldn't see one. That said, the exhibition is well hung from an aesthetic perspective with some nice use of mirroring on occasion.

Using a consistent frame for most of the work also lends coherence and consistency to the display which means that one's eyes always focus on the works and are never distracted by the frame. Top spots have also been used so that works are well lit.

Those botanical artists submitting work to RHS Exhibitions might want to note that Gillian Barlow, the Chair of the Picture Committee is also Deputy Chairman of the Florilegium Society and has a painting in the show (and the book)!

Gardens in Art: Drawings and Paintings by Van Gogh

Flowering Garden with Path
Vincent Van Gogh (Arles July 1888)
Oil on canvas, 72 x 91cm,

I've very much enjoyed doing the research for images, information and links about the drawings and paintings Van Gogh made of gardens - both public and private. He seems to have made gardens one of his prime and enduring motifs for experimenting with mark-making and drawing in both monochrome and colour.

This is the letter to Theo in which he writes about the painting above. It includes a sketch although this is the drawing "Garden with Flowers" (1888) which preceded this painting. He describe it in a letter to his sister thus..

I have a study of a garden one meter wide, poppies and other red flowers surrounded by green in the foreground, and a square of bluebells. Then a bed of orange and yellow Africans, then white and yellow flowers, and at last, in the background, pink and lilac, and also dark violet scabriosas, and red geraniums, and sunflowers, and a fig tree and an oleander and a vine. And in the distance black cypresses against low white houses with orange roofs – and a delicate green-blue streak of sky.

Oh, I know very well that not a single flower is drawn completely, that they are more dabs of colour, red, yellow, orange, green blue, violet, but the impression of all these colours in their juxtaposition is there all right, in the painting as in nature. But I suppose you would be disappointed, and think it unbeautiful, if you saw it. But you see that the subject is rather summery.
Van Gogh - Letter to Wilhelmina Van Gogh 31 July 1888

Gardens are identified as a favourite motif of van Gogh by the author of the book produced to accompany the great exhibition of Van Gogh Drawings which took place in New York and Amsterdam in 2005.

The small areas of planned nature to be found in villages and towns greatly attracted Van Gogh. Wherever he worked, he made pictures of gardens and parks and in Arles they were one of his favourite subjects. He cherished strongly poetic feelings towards these places..........

...His series of parks and gardens (in Arles, drawn between August-October 1888) starts with the impressive view of gardens that he sent to his brother in August. the lush vegetation, depicted with a broad range of pen strokes, makes the summer heat seem almost palpable in these scenes....

In September he often worked in in the park near his house and studio, better known as the 'Yellow house'
Van Gogh - The Master Draughtsman Sjraar van Heughten

Over time, Van Gogh drew and painted quite a few gardens - and they varied in style and colour as his location changed and his style progressed and refined.

Here are some on-line sources of information - there's lots more to look at for those who are interested:

• The database of the Van Gogh Museum can be searched for the tag 'garden' which produces a list of works associated with the word 'garden'
  
• The Van Gogh Gallery provides a comprehensive listing of all
  
• paintings with a title which starts 'Garden...'
• drawings with a title that starts 'Garden'
  
• The web exhibits site which provides a digital database of all Van Gogh's letters can be searched to provide a listing of all those letters which reference a garden.
  
• There are 156 references in all - many commenting on the visual image of a garden, whether drawn, painted or just noted.
  
• It's evident that he used the word/notion of 'garden' in various metaphors ("I want to state from the beginning that I am not living in a garden of roses, but in reality." May 1882).
  
• He also invested in some gardens having symbolic significance for various notions.
  
• You can read about the development of Van Gogh's drawing in the Van Gogh Project which I did in February and also in Van Gogh The Master Draughtsman
  

Early drawings of gardens

Early drawings tend to be of cottages in the flat landscape of Holland. The gardens are bleak and brown - and it always seems to be winter for some reason. Examples include drawings such as Parsonage Garden (1884) (and associated painting), another more detailed drawing of the same subject and the painting of The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in the snow.

Gardens in Provence

Cottage Garden, 1888
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890)
Reed pen, quill, and ink over graphite on wove paper;
61 x 49 cm (24 x 19 1/4 in.)
Private Collection. Metropolitan Museum of Art - Vincent Van Gogh - the Drawings

Drawings and paintings changed in a dramatic way when he arrived in Provence.

One of the images I find most attractive is his reed pen and ink drawing of the Cottage Garden in Arles (note the size!).

You can see the painting he did of the same view here. Personally, I find the drawing to be the more attractive image of the two.

The little cottage garden done vertically is, I think, the best of the three big ones. The one with the sunflowers is a little garden of a bathing establishment, the third garden, horizontal, is the one from which I made some painted studies as well.
Vincent Van Gogh, Letter to his brother Theo, 8 August 1888 Arles

Garden of a Bathhouse is also delightful and is another reed pen and ink drawing - this time of a bed of sunflowers. It's thought that these are the sunflowers which then generated the paintings of sunflowers done in anticipation of Gauguin's visit.

Judith Bumpus in her book "Impressionist Gardens" includes a double page feature on The Garden of the Poets (1888) by Van Gogh.

This painting is of the public garden opposite the Yellow House in Arles - the 'Studio of the South'. It became a motif amongst his garden paintings and he does a lot of preliminary drawings of specific trees and bushes within the park. Here is a letter in which he writes about it - together with a facsimile of the letter which includes a preliminary sketch and the finished painting.

The Poet’s Garden (Le Jardin du poète)

Vincent Van Gogh
Arles, mid-September 1888
Oil on canvas, 73 x 92.1 cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection, 1933.433

He invests the garden with great meaning and context. The title is explained in a letter to Theo dated 17th September 1888

Some time ago I read an article on Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Giotto and Botticelli. Good Lord! it did make an impression on me reading the letters of those men.

And Petrarch lived quite near here in Avignon, and I am seeing the same cypresses and oleanders.

I have tried to put something of that into one of the pictures painted in a very thick impasto, citron yellow and lime green. Giotto moved me most - always in pain, and always full of kindness and enthusiasm, as though he were already living in a different world from ours.

And besides, Giotto is extraordinary. I understand him better than the poets Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio.

Letter from Vincent to Theo, 17th September 1888

Gardens in Auvers (1890)

During his time in Auvers, he painted the garden of fellow artist Daubigny a number of times. One version is now in the Hiroshima Museum of Art - but can be seen here.

The Asylum Garden - Saint-Rémy (1889-90)

Trees with ivy in the asylum garden, 1889
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
Reed pen and pen in ink (now brown), pen on cream wove paper,
62 x 47 cm Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Towards the end of his life many of the drawings and paintings were of the garden of the asylum at St Remy in Provence where Van Gogh stayed when ill.

The Van Gogh Museum website comments on the therapy of painting during the year he spent at the asylum

Van Gogh converts an adjacent cell into a studio, and although subject to intermittent attacks, he produces 150 paintings during the year he stays at Saint-Rémy. His doctor initially confines him to the immediate asylum grounds, so Van Gogh paints the world he sees from his room, deleting the bars that obscure his view. In the asylum's walled garden he paints irises, lilacs, and ivy-covered trees. Later he is allowed to venture farther afield, and he paints the wheatfields, olive groves, and cypress trees of the surrounding countryside. The imposed regimen of asylum life gives Vincent a hard-won stability: "I feel happier here with my work than I could be outside. By staying here a good long time, I shall have learned regular habits and in the long run the result will be more order in my life."
Van Gogh Museum

Here are links to a few of those paintings. If you click on the image you can often see a section of a much enlarged image - which enables you to see the brushwork up close.

• Trees and Shrubs in the Asylum Garden () is a wonderful graphic drawing (47 x 62 cm) done using a brush and thinned oils and ink (now brown), black chalk on wove paper. Due to the transparency of the inks, using the enlarger you can see the initial marks and guides made on the paper followed by the individual marks made in different colours which build up the whole.
• The Garden of the Hospital (the fall of the leaves) (1889) This particular composition has a high vantage point - as if done from a window of a room in a building - probably from the room used as his studio. It's a reminder that we don't need to go outside to draw and paint gardens.
• The Garden of St Paul's Hospital (1889)
  

Another Squidoo lens - Vincent Van Gogh

This is probably a good post to introduce you to another new squidoo lens which is going to be the home for and a way of organising all the Vincent Van Gogh links I've found while studying his work. I've still not managed to include all those from the project on his drawings which I understook in February but they should all be included in the near future - plus the ones from this and other recent posts.

The name of the new lens is Vincent Van Gogh - Resources for Art Lovers and the address of new lens is http://www.squidoo.com/vincent_van_gogh/ . I'll be talking some more about this and other new squidoo lenses in a future post.

Links:

• Van Gogh Museum
• Van Gogh Museum - Van Gogh Collection
• Van Gogh Gallery
  
• Van Gogh - The Master Draughtsman Sjraar van Heugten, with Marije Vellekoop and Roelie Zwikker (Thames and Hudson 2005) - click link to see more details
• Impressionist Gardens Judith Bumpus (Phaidon 1990) - click link to see more details
  
• Vincent Van Gogh - Resources for Art Lovers
  

Gardens in Art: Monet and the flower garden at Giverny

Grande Allee, Giverny

Pastel on Rembrandt Board (NFS)
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

In 1883, Monet moved to a pink house in the Normandy village of Giverny with his two sons, Alice Hoschedé and her six children. The village of Giverny is situated on the right bank of the River Seine about 40 miles northwest of Paris. Monet's fortunes began to revive following the move, sales picked up from the mid 1880s and he began to prosper. His work was accepted by the Salon and an exhibition in New York was a big success. In 1892 he married Alice after the death of her husband and, having bought the house and garden at Giverny in 1890, he was then able to spend the second half of his life living there until his death in 1926. In total the garden was to inspire more than 500 paintings.

Monet's heirs bequeathed the house and garden at Giverny to the French Academy of Fine Arts in 1966. The Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris received the inheritance of the painter's son Michel (the little boy in the painting discussed yesterday) including over 150 works and personal affects (sketchbooks, press clippings, family photos, his father's palette) to create the world's largest museum collection of Monets. The Fondation Claude Monet was established to refurbish and safeguard home and gardens and opened the doors to visitors in 1980. Since then both house and garden have become an extremely popular attraction for people from all over the world. I visited the house and garden in the early 90s - and it's a visit which is still very clear in my memory.

One of the first things he did after he moved in was to start to sort out and transform the neglected orchard and potager. The garden later developed into having two parts - but the water garden came later and will be the subject of my next post.

The Flower Garden in the Clos Normand (Norman field).

My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.....
Everything I have earned has gone into these gardens.....
Claude Monet

When I visited Giverny for the first time I was immediately struck by the fact that Monet did not only create art with oils. His garden was also an artistic creation and is quite simply a living picture created out of nature. It's a sublime example of an artist selecting and creating the objects and their arrangements as part of the 'set-up' for his painting.

However, it should be remembered that Monet revealed towards the end of his life that gardening was something he learned in his youth when he was unhappy and he perhaps felt it had a healing quality. He also referred to his gardening at times as 'a fury of horticulture'.

This post focuses on the flower garden - sometimes referred to as the Clos Normand. I'm going to update this post with a plan of the garden(when I've done one!). In the meantime, here is what it looks like on Google Maps. The large dark rectangle near the top border is the house; the flower garden is then north of the road which runs left to right and the water garden - with lots of trees - is to the south of the road. The Grande Allee is the wide pathway running south from the house - it has a framework of metal arches which are used to create an arbour of climbing roses.

In total, the flower garden is about 3 acres (or 12,000 m2) and is designed in the French style with beds laid out in a geometric way and intersecting at right angles. However planting was far from formal. Monet planned and laid out and planted flower beds and borders according to plant varieties and colours. He carpeted with colour, planting flowers beneath the trees in the orchard and treating the whole garden as if it were the product of an artist's palette. Essentially Giverny has become of the ultimate garden of Impressionism and as one might expect there are numerous books about the planting schemes at Giverny.

The Garden, Giverny (1901-2)

Claude Monet
89 x 92cm, oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

He favoured densely packed clusters of bright flowers: blossoms cascaded over bowers; spread across gravel paths and blazed in the crowded borders. "My garden is slow work, pursused by love" he once said, "...I dug, planted and weeded it myself; in the evening the children watered"
Monet (Eyewitness Art)

and

"Monet had an unmistakeble taste for the unusual and exotic in his Giverny garden. Of course he planted dahlias and nasturtiums too; but as the years went by the garden became more and more a place of pale blue wistaria and purple irises, tuberoses from Mexico, waterlilies gleaming like mother-of-pearl, tufty clumps of bamboo."
Monet (page 72) Christopher Heinrich, (Taschen)

He loved to juxtapose colour. He apparently was particularly partial to blue and violet flowers and I vividly remember pale bluey violet purple shades of various types of flowers out of which grew different varieties with yellowey orange flowers. Proust apparently observed that the flowers were "arranged in a whole that is not entirely of nature, since they have been planted in such a way that only those flowers blossom together whose shades match or harmonise infinitely in a blue or pink expanse"

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment......
Claude Monet

Interestingly the life of the household was completely designed around the needs of painting. I include it here for those who want tips on how wish to paint like Monet

Always up at four of five in the morning, depending on the season, Monet would open his window, on which the curtains would never be drawn and study the sky. Then, regardless of the temperature, he took a cold bath. Monet insisted that he loved getting up and that he often felt like returning to bed just for the pleasure of leaving it again.....
The prospect of prolonged work in the open air and several tastes acquired in the course of his travels abroad had given Monet regular breakfast habits....In England, he had learned he to like the best teas from Kardomah, while in Holland he had begun to eat cold meats and cheese, even to drink milk on occasion.....
Monet always returned home at eleven sharp for lunch, which was served promptly at 11.30...
After Lunch Monet indulged himself in a brief respite, taking his coffee in the studio-salon followed by a glass of homemade plum brandy. If the light had not changed too drastically, he went back to continue painting out of doors. Otherwise he remained in the studio working by himself on his sketches, until interrupted at seven by two rings of the dinner bell. Invariably he went to bed by 9.30 so as to be ready to go before dawn the following morning.
Claude Monet - Life At Giverny Claire Joyes

For those wanting to know more about the House and Garden I'd like to particularly commend "Claude Monet - Life at Giverny" by Claire Joyes (Thames and Hudson) if you can get hold of a used copy. It is full to bursting with detail and photographs of the sort not often found in other books - including a lot taken by the family while living there.

Marion of painting.about.com has made some of her paintings of the house and gardens available here. These have been made available as reference photos for any artists seeking inspiration.

Paintings of the flower garden

I didn't become an impressionist. As long as I can remember I always have been one.
Claude Monet

Monet's flowers are his brush strokes in the living image of his garden. Although he loved books on botanical subjects, he was not an artist who placed a lot of emphasis on botanical detail and was not always very concerned about identifying individual types of flowers in his paintings. His focus was the overall impression and most particularly the effects of light. He also delights in luxuriant growth and often translates them into 'palpitating masses' which have no hard lines and are covered by touches of analogous colours. He also seems to develop a form of calligraphic mark-making for types of leaves or growth.

Irises in Monet's garden, Giverny (1900)
oil on canvas, 81 x 92cm
Claude Monet

His painting of irises illustrates the point about how his intention is always about the overall effect rather than the delineation of an individual flower. It also illustrates very well how the flower beds were always filled to overflowing.

He painted (the irises) with thick short strokes of pure pigment laid on side by side - rather tha mixed or scumbled, to approximate their natural fresh appearance. One visitor claimed that the bright bands of irises seemed to be floating 'like a maze of lilac in the sun'.
Monet's Gardens in Art Debra Mancoff

I also always seem to think of variations in dappled light when I think of Monet's paintings of gardens - he often seems to use dappled shadows and sunlit highlights to break up what could be seen as flat areas (eg pathways) or objects which he wants to hint at rather than reveal in plain view.

Interestingly, figures which dominated his early garden paintings don't feature at all in any done in the twentieth century.

Unfortunately, late paintings of the Grande Allee at Giverny provide evidence of the deterioration in Monet's eyesight while he was suffering from cataracts. Not only does detail disppear completely but his use of colours also changes radically with reds coming to the fore.

My artwork

Houses and gardens have been a theme of my artwork over the years. My pastel painting of the Grande Allee at Giverny in September at the top of this post - with the nasturtiums meadering across the path - was done some time ago and now hangs in my mother's home. I'm hoping to produce another one this week!

Tomorrow - unless I'm out pastelling - I'm planning a post about the water garden at Giverny.

Links:

• Google Maps (France) - Giverny
• Foundation Claude Monet
• Musee Marmottan
  
• The Atheneaum - all images by Claude Monet
• Wikipedia:
• Claude Monet
• Giverny
  
• Making A Mark:
  
• Gardens in Art: Monet and Vétheuil
• Gardens in Art: Monet and Argenteuil
• Gardens in Art continues - with Monet
  
• Gardens in Art - Resources for Artists
  
• Claude Monet - Resources for Art Lovers
• Pastels and Pencils - Houses and Gardens
  

Books (see Claude Monet - Resources for Art Lovers for further details):

• Monet Christopher Heinrich (Taschen).
  
• Claude Monet - Life At Giverny Claire Joyes (Thames and Hudson)
• Monet's Garden in Art Debra P Mancoff
  
• In the gardens of Impressionism Clare A.P.Willsdon
  
• Artists' Gardens Bill Laws
• Impressionist Gardens Judith Bumpus
  

The Rill Garden at Wollerton Old Hall Garden in Shropshire

The Rill Garden, Wollerton Old Hall

11.5" x 17", pencil and coloured pencils
(double page in Daler Rowney A4 sketchbook)
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

This sketch is of the Rill Garden at Wollerton Old Hall Garden in Shropshire - a partner garden of the Royal Horticultural Society.

Wollerton Old Hall Garden is a real find. For me it's the nearest equivalent to Sissinghurst that I've ever come across in the north of England - and my mother and I are veteran garden visitors. Lots of small garden rooms - each with its own very distinctive personality. This is a link to the Wollerton Old Hall Garden website

Wollerton Old Hall Garden is a four acre plantsman's garden developed around a 16th Century house (not open) in rural Shropshire, England. Strong formal design has created many separate gardens each with its own character. It features intensive cultivation of perennials using planting combinations with an emphasis on colour and form, as well as many rare and unusual plants.

The longer post on 'Travels with a Sketchbook......" has some photos and more comments about both sketch and the garden.

Links:

• Wollerton Old Hall Garden
• Wollerton Old Hall Garden - virtual tour
  
• Garden location - just west of Market Drayton in Shropshire
  
• RHS - Wollerton Old Hall Garden

Technorati tags: art, coloured pencils, colored pencils, drawing, plein air, sketch, sketchbook

Gardens and Botanical Art

Tropical Sussex - a work in progress

8" x 10", coloured pencils on Arches HP
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Do you draw inspiration from natural forms? Do you like observing everything about plants? If you do you probably like gardens and you may have become interested in botanical art.

Speaking personally, I love trees and plants and flowers - and gardens, but I guess regular readers of my two blogs may have guessed that by now! I'm even thinking about doing a series about trees for my series project!

Plus I love visiting gardens where you can see them all to their best advantage. I find I sometimes look at a plant in a completely new light when spotting it in a garden I'm visiting. That's what happened to me this summer when visiting Great Dixter - I suddenly saw the leaves of the Canna in a wholly new light. It was like looking at some marvellous abstract sculpture - and I was hooked. I spent simply ages looking at them from every angle and observing how the colours changed every time the light changed. They then took up residence in my head and are demanding to get out - but it's a lot easier said than done!

Great Gardens of the World

What I want to do is share what I know about good gardens to visit and I'm very much hoping people with share with me which are the good gardens that they've visited.

One of the ways I'm doing this is by developing a series of information sites for those interested in great gardens around the world. Below you'll find a lits of the information sites for the first gardens - which have all been created on Squidoo - plus the group site which will hopefully include sites created by other people in due course. People familiar with my travels with a sketchbook will recognise a lot of the names. I've got a lot more in draft but thought I'd share these now with people who want to catch Autumn Colours somewhere new this year - or maybe just take a virtual tour!

What I'm trying to do with these is provide you with all the practical information about what's there and how to get there but also something of a taster of what it all looks like by finding sites which have photos of the gardens.

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew

Over a million people visit the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew each year. The 300 acres of gardens and botanical collections are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which means they rank alongside Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and the Taj Mahal!

Sissinghurst Castle Garden - a great garden

Sissinghurst Castle Garden is probably the most famous 20th century garden in the UK. Find out more about this extremely popular garden whether you love Sissinghurst already or aim to visit in future, in reality or as a virtual visitor.

Great Dixter - a great garden

Great Dixter in East Sussex was created by Christopher Lloyd and is a garden which is extremely popular with gardeners who like plants and flowers. Find out more about this extremely popular garden whether you love Great Dixter already or aim to visit in future - for real or as a virtual visitor.

Bodnant Garden - A Great Garden

Bodnant Garden in North Wales is one of the most beautiful gardens in the UK and is world-famous. It comprises lawns, terraced gardens and is noted for its botanical collections and wide range of plants.

The Great Garden Guide

Visit the great gardens of the world to find out how they got that status! This site provides information about guides to the great gardens of the world.

HELP PLEASE: I have also included a section about Blogging about Great Gardens - so if you've done a blog post in the past about a great garden then let me know and I'll include a link!

Great Gardens Headquarters Whether you're planning to visit a great garden soon or just want to pay a virtual visit, this group contains links to some great gardens.

Botanical Art

I found out yesterday that Valerie Oxley, who specialises in botanical illustration and is a member of both UKCPS and the Society of Botanical Artists has just had a book published - Botanical Illustration.

Botanical Illustration by Valerie Oxley
Crowood Press (September 2008)

Valerie's botanical art credentials are impressive. Valerie developed the Diploma in Botanical illustration at the University of Sheffield, Department of Lifelong Learning (TILL). She's also the Vice-Chairman of the Northern Society for Botanical Art and the Chairman of the Florilegium Society at Sheffield Botanical Gardens.

Valerie also teaches across the UK and this book will be particularly welcomed by Valerie's past and present students who have been urging her to write about the subject for many years!

I've not seen the book yet - but I have taken a peek inside it here - and it looks very interesting.

You can read an outline of what Botanical Illustration is about and what topics it covers in this post on the UKCPS News blog Botanical Illustration by Valerie Oxley.

Gardens in Art: scope and resources

The Rill Garden, Wollerton Old Hall
12" x 16", coloured pencil on Art Spectrum Plein Air Board
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

In August, my monthly project is going to focus on "gardens in art". By this I mean:

• looking at drawings and paintings of gardens
  
• studying how different artists have responded to the motif of 'the garden' in order to understand more about different approaches to drawing and painting the garden
  
• identifying possible influences for my own work
  
• producing more work of my own around the theme of 'gardens'.

I'm open to suggestions about which artists and which topics to look at. You'll find a very provisional list of possibles below. I'm not sure how the project will develop at the moment as I'm rather feeling my way - but I suspect I'll mix generic themes with the development of my own art.

If people would like to participate - either in terms of commenting on my posts or producing art it'll be great to have company of the journey!

Gardens and art: some possible generic themes

• gardens which inspire artists
  
• artists who inspire gardens
  
• how gardens have been painted over time
• how gardens vary by country/culture
  
• Monet and Giverny.
  
• Van Gogh - specifically focusing on his treatment of gardens in drawings and paintings
• Arts and Crafts Gardens - including William Morris's gardens.
• the kitchen garden (because I love walled kitchen gardens!)
  
• examples of contemporary painters of gardens

Developing my own art: a developing agenda

• a review of my approach to date
  
• thinking about composition possibilities - how to tackle gardens as a subject
  
• seasons and colour palettes
  
• pure media versus mixed media
• abstracted versus
  

Some resources and links

I'm very conscious that the two words 'artist' and 'garden' seem to get linked in a number of very twee ways which I'll be seeking to avoid at all costs. For the moment, let's just say it's making searching on the internet "interesting"!

Here are some links which I've found relating to artists and gardens:

• Art History: a list of paintings with garden in the title - on the Atheneaum website
• Giverny - Monet's House and Gardens
• Tate Exhibition (2004) - Art of the Garden
• The Holborne Museum of Art, Bath: Painting the West Country House and Garden
• Charleston - an artists home and garden
• Derek Jarman - and the his garden at Prospect Cottage Dungeness.
• ...and a Google Image search of 'paintings of gardens' throws up some interesting images - including some by people who know me and this blog! Check out whether you can see a painting of yours listed.......
  

and these relate to gardens:

• Garden Finders Lists and Map (various countries)
• National Gardens Scheme and the Garden Finder
  
• National Trust
• Royal Horticultural Society

Here are some books which I expect to be consulting:

• Online:
• Marie-Luise Gothein's HISTORY OF GARDEN ART
• Books:
• The Illustration of Plants and Gardens 1500-1850 (V&A Publications 1982) - I've had this for years and years........
• Monet's Passion Elizabeth Murray (1989)
  
• Arts and Crafts Gardens Wendy Hitchmough (V&A Publications 2005). I bought this yesterday when I realised that I'd already visited about two thirds of the ones that this book lists as recommended for a visit!
• The Gardens of William Morris Jill Duchess of Hamilton, Penny Hart and John Simons (Frances Lincoln 1998). Kelmscott Manor is unfortunately closed to the public due to recent flooding - but I have The Red House close by.

So - that's where I've got to - lots to do plus lots of gardens to revisit I hope! If you'd like to make any suggestions please use the comments facility. If you'd like to join in please leave a note of your blog post address and I'll visit and find your project posts this month.

Note about "The Rill Garden": I developed "The Rill Garden" from material collected (sketch and photos) during my visit to Wollerton Old Hall in April. This a link to my blog post about the visit and the sketch I completed at the time.

You can also see a slideshow of completed paintings of gardens in the gallery devoted to Houses and Gardens on my website.