The Artist’s Garden at PAFA

The impetus to put flowers on canvas was seeded by several social movements associated with the Progressive era (1890-1920), including the emergence of the middle class, women’s emancipation, suburbanization, and conservation. On the cusp of the 20th century, rail networks enabled city workers to commute to homes with yards. Women pursued higher education, journalism, publishing, and art — and horticulture was a socially acceptable and accessible focus in all of these fields. Environmental awareness was growing, as well as the desire for fresh air and pure water. Enthusiasm for public parks and preservation of natural resources took hold.

Artists of the period felt the influence of French Impressionism’s revolutionary treatment of light and color, enhanced by quick brush strokes and plein air painting. Gardens were ideal laboratories for their exploration.

All very interesting and well explained in the exhibit, but culture was not why I had come.

Painting for the senses

I needed an emergency dose of spring. To feel warm sunlight filtering through curtains, to see green grass reflected through a goldfish bowl, to imagine the evening scent of white lilies, the hum of cicadas, and the taste of an alfresco breakfast. That’s what held me transfixed before the canvases.

In Top of the Morning (1895), Philip Leslie Hale placed two women on a porch in airy white gowns, one reclining on a chair, arms raised in lazy relaxation, the other leaning comfortably against a post. Backlit with sun, their billowing sleeves resemble angelic wings. Soft air is palpable in Charles Courtney Curran’s A Breezy Day (1887), as women spread just-washed sheets on the grass to dry. And a window seat provides a peaceful spot for a young reader, her face illuminated by sunlight reflecting up from her book in Daniel Garber’s The Orchard Window (1918).

Many of the works feature architecture, open doors and windows, trellises and porches framing and echoing the plantings. In Hale’s The Crimson Rambler (1908), a woman in an immaculate white dress sits on a balustrade, long red sash trailing behind her, mirroring lush roses twining up a nearby post.

Women frequently populate the works, though most appear to have employed, rather than been, gardeners. While these decorative women don’t have much in common with the women who built careers designing, painting, and writing about gardens, their idealized images, I would wager, are what keep us buying bags of topsoil and trays of annuals.

Unlike the painted ladies, Maria Oakey Dewing knew about turning the soil. She and her husband cultivated a garden in Cornish, a New Hampshire summer art colony. Dewing was noted for painting living blossoms rather than careful arrangements of cut flowers. Her Rose Garden (1901) and A Bed of Poppies (1909) make you want to press your face against the canvas for a whiff.

Childe Hassam is well represented, including In the Garden (Celia Thaxter in Her Garden) (1892), one of several works he completed at Appledore, the New England island home of Thaxter, an author, poet, and master gardener. Hassam provided the illustrations for her book An Island Garden.

The Philly connection

Hassam, Dewey, and many of the other artists represented in The Artist’s Garden have connections to PAFA, and Philadelphia itself was central to the burgeoning gardening movement traced in the exhibit, assembled by Anna O. Marley, curator of Historical American Art.

This is where the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, the nation’s first, was founded in 1827, and it is where the oldest (1829) and largest flower show in the nation takes place every year. (Our review of the 2015 show is here.) Horticulture was showcased at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, and Curtis Publishing Company, which produced home and garden magazines, was headquartered in the city as well. Philadelphia is also where the Garden Club of America originated, in 1913.

Rare autochromes

Two adjunct exhibits expand on the theme of gardens in art. Gardens on Paper, consisting of charcoal sketches, watercolors, and other works, is also on view near the main exhibit in PAFA’s Historic Landmark Building, but perhaps the rarest works are available without even leaving home. As The Artist’s Garden was being prepared, Barbara Katus, manager of PAFA’s Imaging Services, discovered a box of Thomas Shields Clarke autochromes dating from 1910. More than 100 of them can be viewed online.

Autochromes, the earliest method of color photography, are made through a laborious process using glass plates treated with microscopic grains of potato starch and lampblack. They were to be viewed backlit, through a diascope. The resulting images, now more than a century old, are too fragile to be exposed to light for long, but are easily and safely presented digitally. Clark’s autochromes are far better than any early color photography I have seen, with rich texture and varied hues. Unlike the other works on view, they are an antidote for winter’s grip as close as one’s fingertips.

Images, top to bottom:

Daniel Garber (1880-1958), The Orchard Window, 1918, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Philip Leslie Hale (1865-1931), The Crimson Rambler, c. 1908, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Childe Hassam (1859-1935), In the Garden (Celia Thaxter in Her Garden), 1892, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Art Resource, NY