Paintings by the big names of Impressionism, including Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Manet and Sisley, feature in a new exhibition opening in Edinburgh today.
Impressionist Gardens (today til 17 October) is the highlight of the 2010 summer season at the National Gallery Complex. The press launch on Thursday also marked the launch of the Edinburgh Art Festival, Scotland’s largest festival of visual art.
Impressionist Gardens, which is sponsored by BNY Mellon, will be the first exhibition ever to hone in on "gardens", and will bring together around 100 works, with loans from collections around the world, including the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Tate, London. This will be the only UK showing.
The birth of Impressionism in France coincided with an explosion of enthusiasm for gardening. Gardens and flowers were a constant theme in Impressionist painting and inspired some of the today's best-known paintings.
Claude Monet is perhaps the best known in this respect, for the garden he created at Giverny in rural Normandy, with its celebrated water lily ponds.
All the Impressionists, however, featured gardens in their work, ranging from the ‘working’ or kitchen gardens portrayed by Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Berthe Morisot, to the splendidly ambitious gardens of Gustave Caillebotte.
This exhibition will trace the origins of the Impressionist garden, beginning with examples by the great school of early 19th-century flower painters at Lyons and looking at such important precursors as Delacroix and Corot, before moving on to the ambitious central section of the show which will feature many outstanding paintings by the Impressionists themselves.
A final section will examine the ‘spread’ of the Impressionist garden in the late 19th and early 20th century. European and American artists will feature in this section and will include Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Gustav Klimt and John Singer Sargent.
The exhibition will also illustrate the history of gardening during the 19th century, demonstrating how attention switched from the great estates and parks to the suburban garden, an environment which the Impressionists very much made their own in their portrayal of ‘modern life’.
Impressionist Gardens runs at the National Gallery Complex until 17 October 2010 Admission is £10/£7 conc.