Was Claude Monet a painter who gardened? Or a gardener who painted? Visitors to the Royal Academy’s exhibition Painting the Modern Garden, in which Monet is the dominant presence, may find the difference as tricky to resolve as the horticultural details of the blooms conjured by his brushwork.
What is crystal clear, however, is that this exhibition ought to be unusually irresistible in a nation in which eight out of 10 households have some sort of garden and where Monet reproductions adorn thousands of walls. For Monet was not just a master painter of flowers but a painter from and of the age when gardening was emerging, in part as a reaction to industrial-era living, as an emblematic leisure activity and symbol.
The colourful dahlias and chrysanthemums that adorn the canvases at the RA were often newly developed varieties in Monet’s lifetime, their price and allure a reflection of burgeoning European trade links with Asia. And while gardens were expressions of the new status of the leisured class who are occasionally glimpsed in the paintings, they appealed to wider aspiration too.
In the early 1900s, just as Monet was buying the water-lilies that produced the triptych of late period paintings at the climax of the new exhibition, Ebenezer Howard was promoting the garden city movement. The necessity of art and of gardens are twin threads that are woven together through our lives, exactly as they are in this exhibition.
