ART AT NOON | THE ARTIST'S GARDEN

Inspired by European impressionist paintings of open countryside, private gardens, and urban parks, American artists working in the years between 1887 and 1920 turned their attentions to the new landscapes being created in the fast-changing cities and rapidly emerging suburbs of their own country. Up and down the eastern seaboard, with the construction of railways, trams, and parkways that connected city centers to commuter suburbs, inhabitants increasingly turned to gardening as a leisure—and predominantly female—pursuit. "The two arts of painting and garden design are closely related," landscape architect Beatrix Farrand wrote in 1907, "except that the landscape gardener paints with actual color, line, and perspective to make a composition . . . while the painter has but a flat surface on which to create his illusion."

The 2015 exhibition and publication The Artist's Garden, curated by Dr. Anna O. Marley, 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. In this lecture Marley will discuss artists William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, Maria Oakey Dewing, Violet Oakley and others alongside the books, journals, and ephemeral artifacts that both shaped and were products of the garden movement.

Jane Peterson (1876-1965), Spring Bouquet, ca. 1912, Oil on canvas, 40 1/16 x 30 in. (101.8 x 76.2 cm.), Gift of Martin Horwitz.

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