Painting the Modern Garden from Monet to Matisse

Painting the Modern Garden from Monet to Matisse

Monet, perhaps the most important painter of gardens in the history of art, once said that he owed his painting “to flowers”. But there were so many other artists who not only created their own gardens, but made them into the subject of their work – among them, Pissarro, Liebermann, Sargent, Sorolla, Tissot, Kandinsky, Klee, Van Gogh, Klimt and Matisse. The modern garden, changed by 19th century innovations such as hybridisation, the use of glasshouses and foreign exploration, was part and parcel of a period of great social change including the changing face of modern cities to which artists responded from the 1860s onwards. The talk will trace not only the appearance of the garden as a modern phenomenon but the development of new art movements which adopted it as a subject.

Lydia Bauman was born in Poland and studied for her BA in Fine Art at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and an MA in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art.  She has since divided her time between painting and exhibiting as well as lecturing widely to adult audiences and devising online lectures for her own group, Art For The Uninitiated. She has taught at London’s National Gallery for more than 35 years, and intermittently at the Tate Gallery and National Portrait Gallery as well as at collections such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Hermitage and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the latter as a guest speaker for travel companies.