Welcome to Great Art.
For the past few years we've been filming
the biggest exhibitions in the world
about some of the greatest artists and art in history.
Not only do we record these landmark shows,
but we also secure privileged access behind the scenes
of the galleries and museums concerned.
Then we use the exhibition as a springboard to take a broader look.
There's little question that the Impressionist movement
has become the world's favourite genre of art,
but it certainly wasn't always the case.
To begin with, the Impressionists - men like Manet, Renoir, Degas, Monet, Pissarro,
and women like Morisot and Cassat - were reviled and rejected.
But as admiration for their work took hold,
so too did their influence spread.
Among those artists who changed course
on being confronted with the Impressionist movement
were a significant number of Americans -
painters like Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase,
J Alden Weir and Maria Oakey Dewing.
For four decades, from 1880 to 1920, they flourished,
and in doing so, revealed much about their country and its rapid change.
We travelled to America to film an extensive exhibition
that began in Philadelphia in Pennsylvania
and ended in Old Lyme in Connecticut.
In doing so, we were able to make a film
that illustrates a critical stage in American art history,
and indeed in the broader cultural history of the United States of America.
NARRATOR: When one thinks of the Impressionists,
one thinks of Paris or northern France...
..not the gardens and landscapes of Connecticut,
Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
But there is a story to be told of American artists
learning from a movement in Europe,
but making it very much their own,
and very much reflective of an America
that at the end of the 19th century
was undergoing enormous change.
The Artist's Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement
was a major exhibition that originated
at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia
and then travelled to here,
the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut.
It was an exhibition that explored a fascinating
and vitally important period in art.
ANNA O MARLEY: All of the artists included in the exhibition are very unique.
What brings them together is their interest
in gardens and painting outdoors.
I'm always thinking about the connections between art
and socio-political realities.
It opens up a window into understanding our history.
ELSA SMITHGALL: A lot of people think the story of American art starts in the 20th century.
We're really trying to bring back
and re-evaluate, as a field,
the importance of this period
and to really see the roots.
The whole liberation that happens, it's freeing artists up
to think about just simply expressing their response to the world.
The works of these American Impressionists
certainly reflect the moment that they're born from,
and that they're living in.
One of the important points
that's recognised and promoted in this "artist in the garden" exhibition
is that while a painting of a garden is beautiful,
it's also full of the context of the American culture that created it.
At the end of the Civil War in 1865,
the United States nursed some deep and bloody wounds.
And yet the post-war era
also marks the beginning of an extraordinary rise in international wealth.
(BELL CLANGING)
The nation was changing
from one of exploration to one of exploitation -
massive exploitation of natural resources.
Fuelled by the expansion of railroads,
shipping, oil, steel, foodstuffs,
the US became the largest economy in the world.
(TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS)
The rich didn't just get wealthy, they became super-wealthy.
Affluent suburbs sprang up around the cities,
and the emerging moneyed classes
quickly developed an appetite for culture and art.
Meanwhile, a new generation of American artists
looked to Europe for inspiration,
and in particular France.
To visiting Americans, the most appealing art
was that of a new group of European painters
broadly labelled the Impressionists.
These artists painted outdoors,
using unmixed colours in strokes and dabs
to represent the effects of daylight.
They painted not dukes and saints but fishermen and coal-carriers...
..not ancient Rome and Jerusalem,
but the train stations of Paris
and the countryside of Brittany.
Chief among the Impressionists was Claude Monet,
who from 1883 to 1926
lived in Giverny on the river Seine to the west of Paris.
He was an extraordinary gardener,
and at Giverny, he created an ideal environment in which to paint.
MARY MORTON: For Monet, it's about creating a great motif.
The compelling driver is aesthetic, it's visual.
It's, uh, water lilies. It's creating this pond
and architecting, you know, a beautiful Japanese-style bridge
so that you can paint dozens of pictures of this particular motif.
I think it's about really, sort of, zeroing in
on nature but also the present moment,
and the richness of visual perception when you open yourself up to it
and engage in looking hard at one thing.
American Impressionists address the gamut of subjects,
uh, that are addressed by the French Impressionists.
They were interested in urban life.
But the garden was particularly important to them,
because it was a space where one could go for retreat,
for rejuvenation, was kind of a private space.
And so they were following in the footsteps
or following the inspiration of Impressionist practitioners like Claude Monet.
Flowers and gardens are one of the most
popular and essential,
intriguing and even challenging, um, tropes
of American Impressionist artists.
They came to be very important
from their travels to Giverny, to meeting Monet.
And they brought that study of the garden back to the United States,
and became really integral in their approach to plein-air painting.
The popularity of gardening, the Garden Movement,
is very much associated with the rise of the middle class.
There's a growing disparity between rich and poor,
but also an emergence, with industrialisation and urbanisation,
of people who are filling offices to do their work,
but they are also looking for places to live
that can take them back, in some cases, to their agricultural roots.
So the garden itself becomes an important form
for understanding the way that Americans handled
many of the changes associated with modern life.
Millions of new immigrants from Europe,
America's own rural populations transferring to the cities,
and newly freed black slaves moving north from the southern states
all caused overcrowding
in the tenement blocks of northeastern cities.
The more the USA industrialised and urbanised,
the more some harked back to a sense of rural calm.
ANNA: Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Boston
have a new influx of immigrants.
There is a lot of anxiety.
So the people who can afford to,
this newly emerging middle class...
And by "middle class" I mean
doctors, lawyers, artists.
..they now have the ability, with the train lines,
to build these suburban homes and commute into the city.
So they can live on a train line 20 minutes out of the city and commute there,
whereas earlier in the 19th century
they would have lived in their townhouse in the city.
And I think that the Garden Movement
is a reaction to the industrialisation,
as well as mass immigration.
I think in the late 19th and early 20th century,
Americans of a certain class
began to appreciate gardens as a pastime.
And it also, for the more talented of the people involved in it,
it became a challenge for design
and looking into the history of garden-designing,
including, obviously, the UK.
Coming up with their own ideas about how to design gardens,
but in addition to this, there was this whole other movement
of women in particular
starting to write about gardens, the romance of gardens,
and the therapy of gardens.
They talked about garden design and how they designed their gardens,
how they maintained them, where they got their ideas from.
And also, they were all right up to date
on the latest developments in horticulture.
I think artists would have been thrilled by the kind of colour combinations
that they saw in gardens.
But landscape is a subject in art
that has interested practitioners for centuries.
But the subjects that were addressed through landscapes,
especially in American art, were wilderness subjects,
things that emphasised nature in remote areas.
Sometimes you might have a more pastoral adaptation
where you saw a farm, but there would have been a lot of green in those.
It wouldn't have been about this sort of, you know, chromatic contrast
that you saw in a garden.
And it's only with Impressionism, with this new idea
that you could make a painting about a subject
right in front of you.
MAN: 'There is nothing new under the sun.
It remains but to have knowledge and execution,
to treat the ordinary in the highest and simplest way.'
J Alden Weir.
'I feel more and more contented with the isolation of country life.
To be isolated is a fine thing and we are all near to nature.
I could see how necessary it is to live always in the country,
at all seasons of the year.' John Henry Twachtman.
I think American artists were always asking
what was American about their land
and what kind of art could they produce
that would be different from Europe.
In the early 19th century, we have the Hudson River school of painters,
led by Thomas Cole, and also his student Frederic Church.
They were really looking for landscapes that were unique to America.
So they were often studying in Europe but then asking themselves
what was American about American art.
So you see them painting scenes of the Catskills, of the Hudson River Valley,
where they would find, still, a lot of nature that was untouched.
And they were looking to these landscapes
as sources of respite.
They were finding that this untouched wilderness in nature could provide a lot ofpeace.
With the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad,
the nailing of the golden spike at Promontory,
San Francisco is connected to New York,
and the frontier is closed.
There is no frontier any more.
So this idea of the boundless, undiscovered Eden
is not something that Americans are really identifying with any more.
And then we're really at a time
when the cities are so industrialised.
Artists' colonies, as well as garden communities,
are being developed.
NARRATOR: Artists sought the company of like-minded individuals
in locations conducive to painting.
For some, it was the memory of Giverny
and the colony that lived and worked in the hotel there.
Certainly, for all, it was a desire to get back to nature,
living and breathing something they felt so passionately about
with others who felt exactly the same way.
Thus, at the heart of American Impressionism
were a number of artist colonies,
notably Old Lyme, Cornish, Appledore and Weir's Farm.
The American art colonies were definitely started by artists
who spent most of their life in cities, doing commissions,
like the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens,
had a workshop in downtown Manhattan.
But remember, this was in pre-air-conditioning days,
and New York was a sweltering horror in the summer.
So they all were looking for places to go to,
and he discovered Cornish, New Hampshire
and invited all of his friends to come up there and join him.
They went there every summer to escape the heat of the city,
to be with their friends, to relax, to create art.
But, I think, for many of these artists,
gardening was an extension of their artistic practice.
They saw gardening as an art
and they saw what they were doing as 'painting without brushes'.
That's what Anna Lea Merritt called it.
To create a composition through living colour was a challenge for them.
And so I think that
that was an integral part of their interest in colonies.
The art colonies where the Impressionists gathered together
were very important because they were a gathering place.
Uh, artists tended to do this, of course, even earlier.
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about artists...
American artists in Rome in the mid-century.
And he talked about them keeping each other warm.
And there is something to that,
and particularly, the colonies of the Impressionists,
because they could go out together and paint together.
(INSECTS BUZZING)
One of the most significant of the art colonies
was that hosted by Florence Griswold.
On the Atlantic coast, halfway between Boston and New York,
this boarding house became a home of American Impressionist art.
The colony starts here in Old Lyme for a couple of different reasons.
One of them is Florence Griswold,
who is an extraordinary figure who created an important salon
for American artists and cultural figures here in rural Connecticut.
Florence was the daughter of a packet-ship captain
who travelled back and forth between New York and London,
and who retired from the sea in the 1850s.
And so even though she grew up in this town on the Connecticut coast,
her father's profession brought her perspective on a wider world.
Unfortunately, after he retired from the sea,
the family fell on somewhat hard times.
She and her mother ran a school in their house for girls
and accepted boarders starting the late 1870s.
And they closed it in the early 1890s
when changes in women's education
made, uh, somewhat obsolete the model that they followed here,
where women received ornamental training
in needlework and arts like that
and less of a college preparatory education,
which increasingly was what people desired
for the young women in their families.
Florence continued the practice
of welcoming in boarders who weren't students,
and in that context, she met the mother and the sister of an artist
named Clark Voorhees, who took back with him to New York
what he knew of Old Lyme.
And when he met the artist Henry Ward Ranger,
they discussed finding places in the country
where one could find paintable subjects
but also the hospitality that you would need for a nice stay.
Ranger came to Old Lyme in 1899.
He enjoyed his experience here so much
both personally with Florence Griswold,
her bountiful table, the society of the people who were here,
but also the kinds of sights that he found around town.
He would describe the landscape around here as reminding him of Barbizon.
He loved the oak trees growing in this area.
And so he sets out, intentionally,
to create an art colony in this town.
And the next year, in 1900, with Florence Griswold's permission,
he brings back with him a group of artist friends
and the Lyme art colony begins.
Many American Impressionist painters were a product of the middle class.
The group that congregated in Old Lyme
were artists who were not at the beginning of their careers.
They were established, stable, married for the most part,
and had reputations, and were sort of building off of and developing them.
Florence really helped American Impressionism flourish
by the way that she nurtured these group of artists,
turning her house over to them, turning her garden over to them,
and by living in a place that was an embodiment
of the kinds of subjects that American Impressionists were just so eager for.
JENNIFER: Artists came here for a variety of reasons,
and one of those reasons was the community
provided by the boarding house at Florence Griswold's.
The artists could choose rooms,
and often, married couples would take
the larger studios and bedrooms downstairs.
Bachelors and sometimes bachelorettes
would stay upstairs in smaller rooms.
Meals were held in the dining-room, but when it got very hot,
they would also eat outside on the side porch,
and those artists called themselves the Hot Air Club,
not only because of the heat that would proliferate in the dining-room
but also because of the subjects
that they could have casually on the dining-room porch.
I think that the conversations
that artists had in Old Lyme on the porch were wide-ranging.
They might have discussed technique and had disagreements over that,
and we know that they did, but I think they also talked about all aspects
of American culture and politics.
There's a lot of discussion about, 'What is American culture?'
'What are American values?' Questions that are raised
as you have people arriving in larger numbers from other parts of theworld.
And there was a feeling that they had to
really assert an American identity
against the kind of plurality that is brought in by immigration,
and what they promote as a kind of American identity
is this New England identity, a kind of Anglo-American identity.
MAN: 'Don't hesitate to exaggerate colour and light.
Don't worry about telling lies.
The most tiresome people and pictures
are the stupidly truthful ones.'
William Merritt Chase.
'The man who goes down in posterity
is the man who paints his own time
and the scenes of everyday life around him.'
Childe Hassam.
AMY: This is Kalmia by Willard Metcalf.
It's a painting that was done in 1905,
and the name of the painting comes from the Latin term
for mountain laurel, kalmia latifolia.
It's a painting that's important because it represents
Willard Metcalf's transition from an earlier style of art
that he picked up in France. He went to Giverny
and was actually friendly with Claude Monet.
And he spent several years there, off and on, in the 1880s,
before returning to America in 1888.
And it takes a long time for Metcalf to make the transition
from a kind of softly applied paint,
the sort of richly toned colour palette that he used in France,
and to really, kind of, assimilate
the example of Monet's version of Impressionism.
And, in fact, it takes Metcalf almost 20 years to do that.
So, he was feeling a kind of crisis in his career
by the early 1900s.
He talked about how he was suffering nervous anxiety in the city
and he needed to go to the country to paint.
And he ends up at the art colony in Old Lyme,
which is where he painted this picture,
right on the Lieutenant River behind the boarding house where he stayed.
This was a crucial moment for Metcalf.
It's a period he referred to as his 'Renaissance',
when he throws off what was impeding him and holding him back,
and embraces Impressionism.
And in this picture that transition is made quite apparent in the way
that the background and the foreground
relate to one another.
The background is painted in soft greens and blues
and purple tones, which is very reminiscent
of works that Metcalf did in France,
with this very softly blended and applied colours.
And there is a bit of tension or contrast
in this work with the bushes of kalmia
that are growing along the banks of the river here.
This is where you see the Impressionist coming out of Willard Metcalf,
exploding forth in a kind of impasto that he uses,
laying paint on thick in unmodified dabs
to create this burst of flowers.
It's significant that he chose kalmia
as the means for making this transition
because it was a flower that had a lot of significance
in early 20th-century American culture.
It was a native species.
Old Lyme was an area known for having bounteous groves
of mountain laurel that bloomed each year in late June.
And it's a flower that was really embraced
by the American Impressionists and embraced in American culture,
because it was seen as embodying American traits.
That it was native to the soil,
it was hardy, its wood was very hard,
it was evergreen, and it was spoken of
as really, kind of, exemplifying traits
that Americans applied to themselves.
It's analogised to being as enduring as liberty itself
in some of the periodicals of the time.
The patriotic spirit with which the plant was viewed,
associating it with, kind of, liberty
and kind of, uh, claiming this identity, is cemented in 1907,
a couple of years after this picture is painted,
when the flower is named Connecticut's state flower,
after a group of women who were a part of the Garden Movement
mobilised thousands of votes in favour of kalmia as that flower.
This period of the Garden Movement, of American Impressionism,
is completely embedded in what is known
as the Progressive era in the United States.
And the Progressive era is an era of politics
that goes from the mid-1880s right up until 1920,
when American women are finally granted the right to vote.
And it's no accident that this development
of Garden Movement culture
and women's empowerment is happening at the exact same time,
because the garden movement is part of a larger coterie
of Progressive-era developments.
For example, Celia Thaxter, who is the great poet
of the garden in this period,
who grew her own garden at Appledore,
who hosted the artist Childe Hassam there in the summers...
She created a unique partnership
between her gardening practice and her political activity.
She was one of the founders of the Audubon movement.
So, the Audubon movement was founded during this time period
to protect native species of birds.
So, Celia Thaxter, for example, in the famous painting of her
by Hassam, is standing in her garden, hatless.
Why ever would a gardener
stand in the mid-sun without a hat on?
Well, that's not what any gardener I know would do.
The reason she is doing it is
she is doing it as a conscious political act of protest.
At that time the millinery industry was using fauna.
They were actually using feathers from birds
to construct these elaborate, amazing late-19th-century hats.
But women like Celia Thaxter
who were involved in the Audubon movement said,
'We are losing our native species of birds.
We need to protest that.'
And having herself photographed and painted hatless
was one of her ways of protesting that.
Now, women gardeners were also very involved
in being proponents of native species,
of founding local garden clubs.
It was also a time of emerging professionalisation for women.
So American artists become professional visual artists.
But there is also the development of landscape architecture,
and in this period in particular, it becomes a moment of opportunity.
Celia Thaxter plays an equally important part in this story.
Here, on a small island called Appledore,
off the New Hampshire coast,
she created an art colony of major significance.
Celia Thaxter is really well-known in the United States.
At the time, in the 1800s, she was quite famous,
and her poetry was the primary first vehicle for her fame.
And then later, this artist colony that she built up around her.
The Boston Brahmin, as they are called...
The wealthy class was growing at this period.
And this is a new phenomenon in the United States.
And they have time and space in their lives
because of their wealth to enjoy and explore the arts.
The Transcendental movement is also beginning now,
so there's a real connection between religion and nature,
and the glorification and the restorative nature
of being in wilderness.
And this is the Industrial Revolution in the United States.
And so the appeal of Appledore island was a relief
from the dirt and grime of the city.
And also, at that time, the doctors were saying,
'Go to the ocean, and the ocean air will restore you.'
The artists who came to Appledore island really...
..start with Celia's relationship to the Boston scene,
which she marries into.
So, her father's business partner, who helped fund the building
of this grand hotel, the Appledore House,
was Levi Thaxter, and he was from a wealthy family.
And he introduces Celia to the Boston Brahmin scene.
And she actually meets Hassam in Boston
before he ever comes to Appledore.
And this is where she meets most of the artists of the day,
who then she invites to Appledore.
The inspiration for her garden
is she wants to remember a simpler time.
It doesn't have a purpose, it's just purely aesthetic.
It really reflects how the gardener feels about nature,
because it's both contained in the box and raised garden bed
and then it's also wild within that.
And she loved when the flowers spilt out of the garden.
And I can imagine the artists really appreciating that,
because it led to the beautiful Hassam paintings
of Babb's Rock with the poppies in the front.
'Let him but touch a flower
and lo, its soul is his.
Its splendours delicately bright upon the happy page he lays,
its whole sweet history
there to live for time's delight.'
Celia Thaxter.
Childe Hassam came for over three decades.
I mean, he clearly fell in love with the place.
They had a very close relationship, Celia Thaxter and Hassam.
He would stay at her house on some summers.
And he would stay for, often, the entire summer,
but sometimes just a few weeks here and there.
He was clearly so prolific in his work.
There's over 300 paintings painted just of Appledore alone.
It's clearly an inspirational landscape to him.
MAN: 'Art, to me, is the interpretation
of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain.'
Childe Hassam.
JENNIFER: There are several examples in this exhibition
which shows the changing role of women.
Women had long been held as objects of the gaze,
and this was still a popular subject for painters during this time.
But this exhibition shows that women were also becoming actors.
They were associated with flowers, but they could also be actors
as gardeners, as writers and as designers.
In the actual physical exhibition, when it happened at Philadelphia,
I had a section called The Lady in The Garden.
And The Lady in The Garden was, sort of, a double-edged title.
Because it was really about these very idealised women as flowers.
And then there is this whole group of images
of women on the periphery.
There's a Hassam with a woman silhouetted against her garden
with a fishbowl.
So, she is standing there. She is in this very decorative space
with a garden behind her and looking at the fish swimming in their bowl.
I can't help but think that that's an image
of what women are going through at this time period.
They are trying to emerge out of the house,
out of the Victorian era. There are women who are suffragettes.
They're fighting for their right to vote,
they're becoming professional artists,
becoming professional landscape gardeners.
But they do not yet have
equality or any real political power. They are trying to get it.
There are also a lot of images of women reading on this peripheral space.
I think that's important too.
The literacy, the empowerment.
It makes you think of all the women writers.
The publishing business is growing by leaps and bounds.
Ladies' Home Journal is the number one publication in America.
It's published in Philadelphia.
House and Garden is started in Philadelphia in 1901.
And a lot of people who are writing for these periodicals are women.
A lot of people who are reading them are women.
So these trends in painting were really reflecting
a lot of social reforms that were happening,
but people had differing reactions to this,
and you can see that in some of these paintings.
Many of the paintings, you can see women in liminal spaces
where they are kind of betwixt and between, as they were in life.
They are often in domestic settings or looking outside.
And one example of that would be Childe Hassam's painting
Summer Evening, from 1886.
You can see, um, he has painted his wife Maude by a window.
And although she is inside, she is gazing outside
and he is juxtaposing her with this potted geranium.
So he is emphasising the fact that women
were very much interior figures, figures associated with the home,
but he is also showing
a kind of opportunity by placing her by this window.
Windows, in art, were always symbolic.
They represent some kind of opportunity, they're aspirational.
And they can be interpreted in various ways.
So by showing this figure gazing outside the window,
he is really letting the viewer explore
that she may have some kind of mental faculty,
that these larger societal changes were coming into
something he wanted to show through his painting.
But still, she has her hand on the pot of geraniums,
a kind of domesticated flower.
So it's a painting that would appeal to both
conservative and progressive audiences.
'I have not acquired the latest Impressionist style
which so ably represents things
as seen from a motor-car at full speed.
I have been obliged to sit out for many hours daily
in freezing wind and later in burning sun
looking long and carefully at flower and leaf.'
Anna Lea Merritt.
There is a large group of women artists
working in the garden in this period.
One in particular, Maria Oakey Dewing,
was a remarkable garden painter.
She was married to Thomas Wilmer Dewing.
They both lived in the artists' colony up in Cornish, New Hampshire.
Her husband paints women as these diaphanous flowers
in the garden, in a sort of wonderful, mystical blue-green palette.
What Maria Oakey Dewing does is she was the gardener.
So she was very dedicated to her garden.
And she said, 'To become a painter of flowers one must bind oneself
in apprenticeship to the garden.'
So she was in there for years, working in the garden.
And what is unique about her paintings
is she is actually down on the ground.
There's... You can see them all as if you are lying down.
And there's no horizon line,
uh, there's no sky, it's just the flowers.
And one of the contemporary critics of that time, Royal Cortissoz,
said that what she did was paint portraits of flowers.
So, these women artists were there.
They are remarkable, but they are less well-known
than their male counterparts.
So, I think this period of American Impressionism
tells us that women were growing, like their fellow workers
in other fields, into a professional capacity.
But, of course, it's still an environment
in which they face a lot of prejudice about their art,
including what kinds of subjects are considered acceptable.
And so they make important advances
but they're still ghetto-ised in terms of their works.
In part, I think it is the subject matter that is being depicted.
That we are looking at a moment of transformation
in American society, modernisation.
And so when you think about
what kind of subject matter they are depicting,
it's a much more contemporary view of what life is like.
Whether it's in the urban parks and gardens,
whether it's the new life of leisure of the rising middle class,
they are embracing their own culture and time
in a way that was very different than the past had.
This is not just about the grandiose landscapes
but it's really about the interaction of people within those landscapes
and settings, that it marks a different turning point
in really capturing this more modern moment in our culture.
The American Impressionist movement reveals to us
about America at that time
that there was, I think, a real optimism,
a sort of faith in the present
that Americans felt about their society.
It's an era where there is really intensive change,
industrialisation, urbanisation, fight for women's rights...
And as much turmoil and upheaval as those kinds of changes cause,
there is still, I think, a kind of optimism
about America and its potential.
American Impressionists are showing the vitality of cities.
They're showing the beauty of parks and personal gardens.
And that's not to say that they are doing that
and ignoring the strife and tumult of the world that they live in,
but their very selection of those subjects,
they sort of touch points of contemporary culture,
are still ones that they can view in a positive light.
So you may be seeking respite
from the pressures of urban life in your garden,
but that doesn't mean that you can't celebrate it.
I think that in times that are tough,
that these gardens were oases.
The idea that we need this space
in which to reflect, in which to find beauty again and find meaning.
In this moment where, I think, people are seeking beauty and seeking retreat
and seeking a more peaceful environment,
in a way, carving it out even within the hustle and bustle
of these increasingly growing industrialised metropolises
like New York, for example.
From looking at these paintings, the viewer can really see a window
into an America that has become an industrialised nation,
but is developing a love
of the suburbs and a sort of retreat.
These artists really were thinking about the issues
of urbanisation, of immigration.
This was really in the backdrop and in the minds of everyone.
The appearance of gardens in American Impressionism
is something that goes beyond their aesthetic appeal,
or how we react to them as these natural spaces.
When you look at a landscape that shows
a kind of grandmother's garden, an old-fashioned garden,
that it's not just about the flowers
but the way that these flowers promote a certain vision of American culture,
that they address topics like immigration...
And I do think that that's something that we don't
and really can't look at in the same light today,
that we have... much more of a sense of outrage
about the idea of not accommodating
and assimilating and embracing immigration.
It feels a bit uncomfortable to talk about these artists' dislike
of the ways that their world was changing.
But I think those are the issues that governed life
during this time period.
And the garden was meant to be a space where the individual
could resolve some of those tensions for themselves.
The garden landscape is a tool
for managing contemporary life and remaining part of it.
For four decades, these artists,
not only in the northeastern United States but across the country,
reflected their time and their society in their art.
But the 20th century brought new challenges,
new developments and new artistic responses.
Some sought to reflect a harsher side of life -
poverty, exploitation, oppression.
Others decided art itself needed a revolution
and something much more contemporary in approach than Impressionism.
By the 1920s American Impressionism was wilting.
But to understand the history of American art,
to understand the history of America,
one should indeed look to these artists
when they were in full bloom.
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