5 paintings featured in the Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse exhibit - in pictures

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Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT

Merzbacher Kunststiftung

Courtesy of The Hispanic Society of America, New York

Pierre Bonnard, Resting in the Garden, 1914

The Royal Academy curator Ann Dumas has described this painting as looking “as much like a landscape as a garden” and in many ways, that’s precisely the point.

Pierre Bonnard described his garden at Vernonnet, in northern France, as his “jardin sauvage” (wild garden), and was inspired by contemporary ­English ideas about planting and landscape design that called for a looser and more informal aesthetic.

Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1904

If Impressionism was the first movement of modern art, then Monet’s water lily paintings, executed in the garden that the artist created in Giverny, ­Normandy, must surely be its quintessence. Rather than just being pretty, which they undoubtedly are, Monet’s water lily paintings were considered shocking in their time, and by taking representative painting to its very limits, paved the way for the art of the 20th century.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Monet Painting in his Garden at Argenteuil, 1873

Long before Monet created his famous garden at Giverny, with the plants, flowers and water lilies that provided him with his principle subject matter for the final 20 years of his life, the artist dedicated himself to painting outdoors, or “en plein air”.

This portrait, by Monet’s long-time friend and collaborator Pierre-Auguste Renoir, depicts a young Monet painting a neighbour’s dahlias in the garden in his rented home in the village of Argenteuil, not far from Paris.

Wassily Kandinsky, Murnau The Garden II, 1910

Between 1909 and 1914, the Russian Expressionist painter Wassily Kandinsky and the German artist Gabriele Münter not only frequently stayed at a house in Murnau, Bavaria, but also furnished it together, laid out the garden, and decorated their furniture with their own painted designs.

The house, its garden and the immediate surroundings often featured in Münter and Kandinsky’s work during this period, and it was through his interest in the landscape that Kandinsky increasingly explored and moved towards the kind of abstract painting that he was to pioneer.

Joaquin Sorolla, Louis Comfort Tiffany, 1911

The name Tiffany may be more readily associated with jewellery nowadays, but during the early 20th century, it was synonymous with an individual. Now famous for his art-­nouveau glass lamps, ­Louis Comfort Tiffany produced leaded-glass windows, mosaics, lighting, glass, pottery, metalwork, enamels and jewellery, as well as interiors.

This portrait by the ­Spanish artist Joaquin Sorolla depicts Tiffany in the garden of his long-since-demolished 97-­hectare Long Island estate, Laurelton Hall, which the designer built at the height of his fame, and which was also widely recognised as his most ambitious and complete ­creation.

Sorolla was also a keen gardener, and created a beautiful garden, inspired by the ­Islamic gardens of Andalusia, at his house in Madrid.