Video: inside the artists' gardens
Published on 4 May 2020
Join curator Ann Dumas on a tour through the gardens of Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard, Emile Nolde, Max Liebermann and Henri Le Sidaner. Filmed ahead of our 2016 exhibition, 'Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse', take a moment to escape to the idyllic rural wilderness.
Curator Ann Dumas introduces Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny in Normandy, which is usually open to the public between March and November and maintained by a team of gardeners led by James Priest.
Royal Academy Curator Ann Dumas introduces Pierre Bonnard’s garden at Vernonnet in Normandy (now a private home), which the artist referred to as “mon jardin sauvage” (my wild garden).
Royal Academy Curator Ann Dumas introduces Henri Le Sidaner’s garden in the medieval village of Gerberoy, Picardy, which provides the subject matter for a number of his works in ‘Painting the Modern Garden’.
A successful Impressionist artist, Max Liebermann moved here in 1910, building a grand garden and villa at the edge of a beautiful lake outside Berlin. Neatly dividing the land into a series of “rooms” and alleys, he reflects a formal trend in German garden design at the time – and then rejects any precision at all in his painting, depicting it with a wild flurry of brush strokes and colour.
Having exhibited with Kandinsky and other members of the German Expressionist groups, Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke, Emil Nolde moved north with his wife in 1927, building a house and garden in the countryside near the Danish border. Devoting most of his time to the garden and his work, he planted his favourite flowers – in a wilder, more homely style than Liebermann’s – and then painted them in close-up views, focusing on their bright, saturated colours. We can still see the marks where he tested his colours on his outside cabin, next to the flower beds.
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