Impressionist Gardens

Monet once said that his only two interests in life were painting and gardening. In Giverny, he combined these enthusiasms to create the most famous of artists' gardens. This beautifully illustrated book is the first about the Impressionists' paintings of gardens and flowers, a favourite and richly developed subject of all the artists, including Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley. For many of the Impressionists, cultivating flowers afforded as much pleasure as painting them and they exchanged enthusiastic letters about the propagation of irises, chrysanthemums and dahlias. With their revolutionary approach to rendering outdoor effects and fleeting atmospheric conditions, they captured the sunlit colour and mood, and almost the smell of flower gardens. In doing so, they registered a new public sensibility: the love, not just of fresh air and greenery, but of gloriously colourful settings on a domestic scale.