The Artist’s Garden

The Artist’s Garden explores the connections between the American Impressionist movement and the emergence of gardening as a middle-class leisure pursuit. It’s a theme ideally suited to The Huntington, where the historic botanical gardens established by Henry and Arabella Huntington surround the art galleries that house the collections.

This exhibition gets behind the undeniable beauty of impressionistic pictures of gardens and asks questions about the social activity of gardening, the scientific hybridization of plants, and even early environmental conservation,” said James Glisson, the Bradford and Christine Mishler Assistant Curator of American Art at The Huntington ... . During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Impressionist artists who had studied en plein air (outdoors, often in the countryside) in France were bringing home lessons to apply in an American context. Paintings in The Artist’s Garden show domesticated landscapes set in the suburbs, or even in the middle of the city. 

Exhibition overview from Museum website

Whether you go or not, the richly-illustrated exhibition catalog The Artist's Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement tells the intertwined stories of American art and the new American garden movement in the years on either side of the turn of the twentieth century. Anna O. Marley and her contributors showcase more than one hundred beautifully reproduced artworks by Cecilia Beaux, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, and others alongside the books, journals, and ephemeral artifacts that both shaped and were products of the garden movement.