Few schools of painting explored the pictorial qualities of flowers as fashionably as impressionism. From the poppies and waterlilies in Monet’s work to the irises in van Gogh’s, flowers are one of the defining features of the artistic movement that changed the way people look at the world.
The achievements of American painters such as Childe Hassam and William Merritt Chase may be modest compared to those giants of impressionism, but their work has endured long enough to inspire a new exhibition of flowers at the New York Botanical Garden in The Bronx.
“Impressionism: American Gardens on Canvas” gathers 23 works of art with dominant floral compositions, and then shows how groupings of these same flowers inspired the artists.
The paintings are displayed in the Mertz Library, reached by entering the garden at the Mosholu Gate, and the flowers are in the Haupt Conservatory.
Peonies are a popular subject in the paintings of Daniel Putnam Brinley and Matilda Browne, and are prominently featured along the slate path inside the conservatory, their branches curving overhead under the weight of the lush blossoms. Bearded irises, seen in the work of William Chadwick, dazzle in combinations of yellow and purple and lavender and violet.
The new show, with its tens of thousands of flowers, differs dramatically from previous exhibits, which celebrated the floral sensibilities of Monet, in 2012, and Frida Kahlo, last year. “There’s no one garden in these paintings to hook the show around,” says Todd Forrest, NYBG’s vice president of horticulture and living collections. “What we saw were the plants in the paintings. The roses, lilacs, hollyhocks, phlox and digitalis to create a history of gardening at that time.”
(below) make up part of the rainbow of petals growing in The Bronx.Annie Wermiel
The exhibition also celebrates the rise of colonial gardens in America. Coming into prominence after the 1876 centennial, they featured flowers planted close to homes’ entrances. The conservatory’s centerpiece is a reproduction, by the Brooklyn-based firm Daedalus Design, of the weathered front porch of a clapboard home of the era. It provides an ideal vantage point, courtesy of two rocking chairs, to view the slate path flanked by everything from spiky Echium and lupine to brash red Iceland poppies and snappy yellow calendula. There is also a small garden surrounding the “house.” Thriving there are irises, blue and white delphiniums, fluffy lavender hydrangeas, Orange King California poppies and a plant called “painted tongue” whose blossoms are bell-shaped and come in a color called kew blue. The effect is so soothing that one visitor, on her rocking chair, was overheard to say, “I want someone to bring me a glass of lemonade.”
The pastoral nature of the paintings, many of which were completed at artists’ colonies in places such as Shinnecock Hills on Long Island, reflects a desire to reconnect with the natural world in the face of turn-of-the-century industrialization, Forrest says. So gardeners chose plants that possessed “great beauty, great ruggedness and informality.”
If your idea of a garden is the formal magnificence of Versailles or the stately fountains of the Boboli, head to France or Italy. If you’re looking for something intimate with a nostalgic glow, you can’t do better than to take the D train to The Bronx.
“Impressionism: American Gardens on Canvas,” through Sept. 11. $8 to $25. New York Botanical Garden, 2900 Southern Blvd., The Bronx; NYBG.org