Garden Paintings

One of the abiding subjects for painters has been gardens. From Roman times up until our own era painters have made images of gardens--public gardens, private ones, and imaginary ones. In our own time, the painter who has a garden nearby for subject matter is truly in luck.

Detail, Garden Fresco, Villa of Livia

The only Roman paintings available today are frescoes since wood and cloth (today's painting supports) will have decayed and disappeared. Nonetheless, fresco was very popular during the Roman period and numerous excellent examples exist, many of which were intended to imitate gardens. Some of the best examples have been found in the Villa of Livia, north of Rome, one of the domiciles of the wife of Augustus Caesar. The Garden Room is completely encircled by a fresco (detail, right) representing a garden in full bloom.

Gardens as subject matter were probably useful partly in religious artwork owing to the story of Eden, among other sources. The great Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) painted one of the most enduring scenes in his Garden of Earthly Delights, which even today seems to elude explanation. It is actually a tryptich, chock-full of obscure symbols. It hangs in the Prado in Madrid.

Diego Velazquez, "Facade, Grotto at the Villa Medici," oil, ~1630

During the two centuries or so after Bosch, there were plenty of artists making landscape paintings--Claude Lorrain for example in France--but gardens weren't generally subjects for easel painting. An occasional exception is sometimes interesting. Although Velazquez, the great Spanish painter, is known primarily as a portrait and figurative artist, his "Grotto at the Villa Medici, Rome," painted in 1630 (and presumably on the spot) is a great example of the kind of work that would follow centuries later. It is nearly monochromatic and to my eye even has a resemblance to the palette of Andrew Wyeth. Velazquez subject was the facade of the garden loggia (still there) in the Villa Medici in Rome. It foresees works more than two hundred years later. 
In the 18th and 19th centuries, as art horizons expanded to include personal and private works after centuries of religious and organizational patronage, subject matter expanded too. Landscapes, gardens, the sea, common people, and more began to occupy the creative minds of Europe and elsewhere. Gardens appear in the art of the 18th century and early 19th but are generally the stages for human endeavors. But by the late 19th century (maybe as pigments became brighter and more portable), formal and informal gardens moved to the foreground. These two paintings by the same artist, Claude Monet, show what happened. The first, "Women in the Garden," was painted in 1866 when he was quite young, and the second, "The Artist's Garden at Giverney" was finished more than thirty years later. In the second work you can see hints of what was coming from Matisse, Picasso, and others in only a few short years.

Women in the Garden, oil, 1866

The Artist's Garden at Giverney, oil, 1900

Claude Monet is probably the paradigm of the artist-gardener. His oeuvre is full of gardens as subjects from his youth to the celebrated water lilies.

Gardens are part of my own work, mostly outdoors. A few years ago one of my habits was to sketch outdoors in watercolor, and occasionally I did so in a wonderful spot downtown, the Better Homes and Gardens Test Garden. My own garden at home has continued to be a source of inspiration though, as you can see in the second watercolor below. The first is a sunny corner of the test garden where bright annuals and perennials are clustered along the winding pathway. The bench in the background is a pleasant spot to take in the shady corner where I sat to do this 7x9 sketch.

The sketch at the bottom is about 5x9 in one of my sketchbooks. After a rain I went out and sketched the lilies and black-eyed susans along the edge of one of the beds in the front garden. The lilies grow nearly six feet tall and make blazes of orange against the dark green foliage of the woods beyond.