Garden
"Gardens Are Works of Art Rather Than Nature"
We picked up our copy of Humphry Repton; Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England by Stephen Daniels in order to reintroduce ourselves to his vast number (400 during a thirty-year career) of landscape commissions. New York's Morgan Library and Museum is presenting Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art and Landscape Design, an exhibition that demonstrates how the Romantic Movement in literature influenced the style of landscape design in England, France, Germany, and the United States.
The Morgan site notes that: The Romantics looked to nature as a liberating force, a source of sensual pleasure, moral instruction, religious insight, and artistic inspiration. Eloquent exponents of these ideals, they extolled the mystical powers of nature and argued for more sympathetic styles of garden design in books, manuscripts, and drawings, now regarded as core documents of the Romantic Movement. Their cult of inner beauty and their view of the outside world dominated European thought during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The exhibition features approximately ninety highly influential texts and outstanding works of art, providing a compelling overview of ideas championed by the Romantics and also implemented by them in private estates and public parks in Europe and the United States, notably New York's Central Park.
Also on view are two manuscript 'Red Books' by Humphry Repton (1752–1818), the leading landscape architect of his time and author of theoretical treatises greatly admired by Pückler and other European connoisseurs. In these publications and the Red Books (known for their characteristic red bindings), Repton developed a technique of showing before-and-after views of picturesque scenery so that his readers and clients could see at a glance what he expected to accomplish.
Repton's biographer Daniels also was the author of a Gothic Gallantry: Humphry Repton, Lord Byron and the Sexual Politics of Landscape Gardening, from which we're quoting:
A Bouquet of Monets
New York City's Gagosian Gallery is presenting 27 of Monet's paintings, one of several presentations of the artists's works on view in recent years:
Oscar Claude Monet was born in Paris in 1840. As a teenager, he developed a reputation as a caricaturist, and studied with the landscape artist Eugéne Boudin. Over the course of his prolific career, he produced more than 2,000 paintings. By end of the 1890s he was well established and hailed as France's leading landscape painter. In the remaining years of his life, he staged only four exhibitions, all in Paris — recent works and views of Le pont japonais in 1900, a selection of London paintings in 1904, the Nymphéas in 1909, and views of Venice in 1912 — each to great critical acclaim. On November 12, 1918, the day after the Armistice, Monet offered to donate two paintings to France in honor of the victory. This offer became the basis for his eventual gift of twenty-two decorative panels depicting his water lily garden, which were installed permanently in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris in 1927. Recent exhibitions of his work include "Monet in the 20th Century," Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1998, traveled to the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 1999); "Monet, le cycle des Nymphéas," Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris (1999); "Claude Monet ... Up to Digital Impressionism," Fondation Beyeler (2002); "Monet's Garden" and "Monet's Water Lilies," Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010). Oscar Claude Monet died at Giverny in 1926 at the age of 86.
Take a virtual trip through the first 34 pages of the book, Monet's House; an Impressionist Interior, online. There's also a country by country list of museums' holdings of original Monets.
If you're interested in painting techniques, in 2006 NPR launched "a mini-series on how art is affected by available technology" and began with "the link between collapsible tin tubes and some of the world's best-loved paintings". The following excerpt including quotes from Monet's well known biographer, Prof. Paul Tucker, who imparts some details of the process as well as an amusing bit or two:
The Potent Plant Garden, Patterned After Agatha Christie's Novels
The Royal Horticultural Society describes the Potent Plants garden at Torre Abbey in England thusly:
"Poisonous plants used by some of Agatha Christie's most notorious villains have come together in a new garden at Torre Abbey in Torquay, Devon, where the crime writer spent much of her life."
"Head gardener Ali Marshall read more than 80 of Agatha Christie's novels and short stories to put together the garden. Among the plants she chose are Prunuscultivars, such as dwarf peaches and nectarines, whose fruit stones produce cyanide — the murder weapon in several novels including, of course, Sparkling Cyanide. Deadly nightshade, used by the murderer in The Caribbean Mystery is grown alongside aconite, responsible for poisoning several characters in 4.50 from Paddington."
" ' While this might sound extremely dangerous for staff and public alike we have been very careful in our choice of plants, substituting less potent garden cultivars where possible,'says Ali. 'This is a garden designed to entertain — not provide murderous opportunities!' "
"In addition to the central display, Ali has also concocted a horticultural whodunnit for visitors to solve. In the beds surrounding the poison garden she has planted a series of clues to the titles of four of Agatha Christie's short stories — a puzzle which, she says, has tested even the most avid of Christie's fans."
The Torrey Abbey Garden notes that, "In a final twist the potent plants are framed by flowerbed containing horticultural clues pointing to four of Agatha Christie's short stories."
Some of the 'potent' plants will be familiar, some not:
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