The Artist's Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden MovementAnna O.Marley, Editor. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Abstract

Artist's Garden: Impressionism and Garden Movement Anna O. Marley, Editor. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.This book is published in conjunction with exhibition, The Artist's Garden: Impressionism and Garden Movement, 1887-1920, a show organized by Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. exhibition was held at Academy from February 12th to May 24th, 2015 and will travel to three other locations across country over course of 2016: Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA; Reynolda House Museum of Art in Winston-Salem, NC; and Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, CA.This exhibition catalogue does an excellent job of engaging both scholars and general public. It is a beautifully designed volume, containing more than one hundred full-color illustrations of paintings, sculptures, book illustrations, book covers, chromolithographs, and auto chromes from period. But it also features some of latest, and best, scholarship on a period in cultural that is only now being understood to be very complex and conflicted. Essays in book include Anna Mar ley's Producing Pictures without Brushes: Artists and Their Gardens; Virginia Grace Tuttle's Desperately Aesthetic Business': Garden Art in America, 1870-1920; Alan C. Braddock's Home of Hummingbird: Thaxter, Hassam, and Aesthetics of Nature Conservation; Erin Leary's 'A Tendency to Outstrip Native Blossoms in Life's Race': Nativism in Impressionist Gardens; Katie A. Pfohl's The Garden Painted, Planted, and Printed: Chromolithography and Impressionism in America; James Glisson's American Impressionists and Problem of Urban Parks; and Judith B. Tankard's Designing Paradise: Women Landscape Architects and Country House Garden.As Marley explains in her introduction, this catalogue and exhibition are first to address the intertwining stories of artists, impressionism, and growing popularity of gardening as a middle-class leisure pursuit at turn of twentieth century (1). Previous publications on impressionist gardens (such as May Brawley Hill's Impressionists in Garden, 2010 or William Gerdts's Down Garden Paths: Floral Environment in Art, 1983) had confined themselves to a fine art approach to subject with little attention to social history (8-9).As titles of essays in this volume suggest, Marley and her collaborators probe much more deeply than previous scholars into questions concerning what was really going on behind scenes in this seemingly innocent confluence of painting and gardening in Progressive-era America. …