Tag Archives: paintings

Art in the garden

29 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in design, news, shows

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Kandinsky: Murnau the Garden II (1910) – at the Royal Academy’s exhibition (love love love this)

Gardens and art walk hand in hand. Gardens inspire art; art inspires gardens. No wonder, really, for both draw their reason for being from instincts for beauty, form and the ability to change the way the person who looks at them views everything that follows.

I’m a bit biased, of course, and I know I’ll scandalise ‘proper’ arty folk, but I’ve always secretly thought gardens the superior art form. Gardens are, after all, four dimensional, to painting’s two and sculpture’s three. Gardens are not only there to be looked at: they are there to be smelled, and touched, and felt. And they exist in fourth dimension, too: that of time. It takes some artist to create a vision that transports the visual and every other sense too, and then keeps it beautiful while it constantly changes with the turning of the seasons.

But anyway, before I start getting too pretentious, the reason I’m going on about this is that anyone who’s a gardener and also likes art (so that’s all of us, then) is positively spoilt at the moment.

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‘Flower Garden’, Emil Nolde, 1922, also at the Royal Academy (love this one too)

I was blown away earlier this year by the Painting Paradise exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, at the side of Buckingham Palace: breathtaking art, garden history and heaven for plant-lovers all in one deliriously happy visit.

And now it’s the turn of more recent paintings to feature gardens: the Royal Academy of Arts is exploring the way gardens led artists from the literal to the impressionistic in ‘Painting the Modern Garden’. Not ‘just’ Monet and Manet, but also Klimt, Matisse, Kandinsky, Van Gogh and – a personal favourite of mine – Mary Cassatt. It opens on 30 January and I will be first in the queue.

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Edward Chell’s cyanotypes at the Horniman Museum

And there’s more: Bloom at the Horniman Museum is an exhibition of exquisite and other-worldly plant silhouettes created by Edward Chell, inspired by cyanotypes – the same photographic process which produces blueprints – made by 19th century naturalist Anna Atkins (this one closes on 6 December, so get there quick).

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‘Strawberry Thief’, William Morris, 1883

At the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne (it’s not all London, you know) Rosa Nguyen – last seen making ceramic trees in a London park during the 2013 Chelsea Fringe – is one of the artists featured in The Arts and Crafts House: Then and Now.

Leading light of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris, was of course largely responsible for bringing the house into the garden and the garden into the house: his influence spread far beyond wallpaper, and I suspect we owe him much more than we’ll ever realise.

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Rosa Nguyen creating her installation ‘Gardening With Morris’ at the Laing Gallery

Then there are the exquisitely detailed paintings of fruits by Shirley Sherwood at Kew Gardens; intricate watercolours of orchids by naturalists The Bauer Brothers at the Natural History Museum; and if your tastes are more hard-core modernist and allegorical there’s always Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds (at the Royal Academy again). What a feast.

By royal appointment #1

30 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by in shows

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Ever since my father in law came back from a charity shop some years ago armed with Roy Strong’s weighty tome, The Artist and The Garden (which I subsequently discovered is a classic widely used by horticulture colleges teaching garden history), I have been fascinated by how much of what we know about gardens through history is glimpsed over the shoulders of people’s portraits.

In fact I was inspired to write a blog post at the time – and now I’m reprising on the subject as a few weeks ago I had the enormous privilege of coming face to face with many of the paintings I talked about then, in the original, larger than life and twice as impressive.

They were all part of ‘Painting Paradise’, the breathtaking exhibition running all this summer at the Queens Gallery just to the side of Buckingham Palace in London. Don’t miss it – I don’t usually rave about exhibitions (I don’t even go to them very often) but this one is really special.

Among paintings that made me stop in my tracks were this portrait of King Henry VIII, familiar from Roy Strong’s book but oh, so much more impressive in real life:

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British School, 16th century, The Family of Henry VIII, c. 1545. Oil on canvas, 144.5 x 355.9 cm (support, canvas/panel/str external). RCIN 405796. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014

It’s huge, occupying the best part of a wall in the exhibition, and its importance to garden history can’t be overstated: those background peeks are I believe the only authentic visual record of what Tudor gardens were really like.

But it goes back further than that. There is a beautiful section on Persian gardens, including the earliest illustrated Islamic manuscript in the Royal Collection dating back to 1510 including the lovely miniature, ‘Seven Couples in a Garden’ by Mir’Ali Shir Nava’i.

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Mir ‘Ali Shir Nava’i (d. 1501), Khamsa (Quintet) of Nava’i, 1492. Manuscript on gold sprinkled paper, written in superb nasta’liq script, with elegant illuminations at the beginning of each poem, and six miniature paintings. | 34.4 x 23.0 cm (book measurement (conservation)) | RCIN 1005032. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014

Then – much later – there was this astonishing picture of a stag hunt against the magnificent setting of the – presumably only just completed – Versailles gardens in the background:

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Attributed to Jean-Baptiste Martin (1659-1735), A Stag Hunt at Versailles, c. 1700. Oil on canvas, 120.0 x 180.4 cm (support, canvas/panel/str external). RCIN 406958. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014

Apparently the water in that huge lake wouldn’t have actually been there at the time: all the water in Versailles was pumped at enormous inconvenience and expense from various ponds and reservoirs so they couldn’t keep them going all the time and would only turn them on when the King was walking around the gardens.

And then there was this massive aerial view of Hampton Court – I must admit I found it hardly recognisable from my own knowledge of the modern-day garden (visited each year for the RHS Hampton Court Flower Show). It makes you realise just how radically it’s changed over the centuries.

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Leonard Knyff (1650-1722), A View of Hampton Court, c. 1702-14. Oil on canvas, 153.1 x 216.3 cm (support, canvas/panel/str external). RCIN 404760. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014

And just one last one: I was also rather taken with this depiction of Christ and Mary Magdalene at the Tomb:

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Rembrandt van Rijn (Leiden 1606-Amsterdam 1669), Christ and St Mary Magdalen at the Tomb. Signed and dated 1638. Oil on panel, 61.0 x 49.5 cm (support, canvas/panel/str external), RCIN 404816. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014

There is a great deal of symbolism evoked by gardens depicted in paintings. Here, it’s all about referencing that old Persian idea of the garden as an earthly Paradise: Jesus, of course, is showing Mary the paradise of Heaven.

I do like the idea of Jesus Christ as a gardener: if you look closely he’s holding a trowel and has something like a pruning knife shoved into his belt. It fits, somehow. Love that hat, too.

There’s so much more to write about I feel a second post coming on. But do go and see the exhibition: it’s truly inspiring. You have until 11 October to get yourself over there – find out a bit more about it, how to get tickets etc here.

 

Garden words: Gardens as Art #2

28 Thursday Jan 2010

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I must confess I find portraits a bit boring. Those po-faced people you see lining the oak-panelled walls of stately homes were probably delightful people who would have made deliciously witty dinner guests, but as portraits they’ve never done much for me.

Well – now I know better. Now I know to look over their shoulders.

Roy Strong’s ‘The Artist and the Garden’ is proving a revelation, and I suspect I may never see old paintings in quite the same way again.

This is probably the most famous painting where the background has caused more of a stir than the foreground:

You may well recognise the big fat king in the middle, but don’t look at him – take a peek through those arches on either side. This painting hangs in Hampton Court (holiday home, of course, to Henry VIII) and the glimpse of a garden in the background is just about all that is known of Tudor gardens of the time. A Tudor garden has in fact been entirely recreated, at Hampton Court, complete with snazzy green-and-white raised beds and heraldic beasts on poles, on evidence taken pretty much solely from this painting.

This is Thomas More and family, painted in 1593-4 and currently in the V&A. Yes we all know he was executed for daring to stand up to Henry VIII but never mind that – just look at that garden. That’s a hortus conclusus – an enclosed, mediaeval garden and rare evidence that even then they were doing garden rooms, fenced off with clipped hedges of whitebeam or privet.

And how about this, from 1641? Never mind Arthur 1st Baron Capel and his family – that’s a heck of a garden back there. It is in fact Hadham Hall in Hertfordshire in all its glory, as it was laid out in the late 1630s. The people in the portrait mostly came to a sticky end (particularly Arthur who was executed shortly after Charles I for his loyalty to the king – spectacular example of backing the wrong horse) and so did the Elizabethan house – it was partially destroyed by fire and is now a secondary school. But at the time it boasted the most extravagant garden of its age, and this is one of the best – and only – depictions of its former grandeur. You can see it at the National Portrait Gallery.

This young lady, to be found at the National Maritime Museum, is my favourite though. She’s Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, painted in 1603, but never mind that. See that structure behind her right shoulder? That’s worth a closer look.

It’s an arbour, and it’s made entirely of pleached trees. Apparently you plant a ring of trees, then pleach the tops into a ‘roof’. You can incorporate extra carpentry – as here – and then plant another tree in the centre and pleach it like an umbrella to make a secondary tier. According to Sir Roy, this is the only representation we have of tree pleaching on this scale in England, although it was quite common in Italy (the Medicis, of course) and the Netherlands.

If there’s one garden design feature which deserves to be resurrected, this has to be it. Anyone short of ideas for next year’s Chelsea?