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, a middle-class idyll was brought to life with the construction of railways, trams, and parkways that connected city centers to commuter suburbs, whose 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 Artist's Garden 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. Anna O. Marley and her contributors showcase more than one hundred beautifully reproduced artworks by Cecilia Beaux, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Cha