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When one thinks of the impressionists,
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one thinks of Paris or northern France.
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Not the gardens and landscapes
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of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
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But there is a story to be told
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of American artists learning from a movement in Europe
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but making it very much their own,
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and very much reflective
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of an America that, at the end of the 19th century,
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was undergoing enormous change.
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American Impressionism and the Garden Movement
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was a major exhibition
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that originated at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia,
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and then travelled to here,
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the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut.
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It was an exhibition that explored
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a fascinating and vitally important period in art.
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All of the artists included in the exhibition are very unique.
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What brings them together is their interest in gardens,
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in painting outdoors.
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I'm always thinking about the connections
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between art and socio-political realities.
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It opens up a window into understanding our history.
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A lot of people think the story of American art
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starts in the 20th century.
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We're really trying to bring back and re-evaluate as a field
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the importance of this period and to really see the roots.
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The whole liberation that happens,
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it's freeing artists up
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to think about just simply expressing their response to the world.
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The works of these American impressionists certainly reflect
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the moment that they're born from and that they're living in.
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One of the important points
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that's recognised and promoted in this Artist in the Garden exhibition
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is that, while a painting of a garden is beautiful,
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it's also full of the context of the American culture that created it.
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At the end of the Civil War in 1865,
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the United States nursed some deep and bloody wounds.
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And yet the post-war era also marked the beginning
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of an extraordinary rise in international wealth.
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The nation was changing
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from one of exploration to one of exploitation,
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massive exploitation of natural resources.
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Fuelled by the expansion of railroads, shipping, oil, steel, foodstuffs,
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the US became the largest economy in the world.
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The rich didn't just get wealthy; they became super-wealthy.
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Affluent suburbs sprang up around the cities
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and the emerging moneyed classes quickly developed an appetite
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for culture and art.
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Meanwhile, a new generation of American artists
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looked to Europe for inspiration, and, in particular, France.
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To visiting Americans, the most appealing art
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was that of a new group of European painters
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broadly labelled "the impressionists".
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These artists painted outdoors,
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using unmixed colours in strokes and dabs
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to represent the effects of daylight.
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They painted not dukes and saints, but fishermen and coal carriers.
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Not ancient Rome and Jerusalem,
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but the train stations of Paris and the countryside of Brittany.
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Chief among the impressionists was Claude Monet,
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who from 1883 to 1926 lived in Giverny,
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on the River Seine to the west of Paris.
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He was an extraordinary gardener
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and at Giverny he created an ideal environment in which to paint.
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For Monet it's about creating a great motif.
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The compelling driver is the aesthetic.
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It's visual, it's water lilies,
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it's creating this pond
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and architecting a beautiful Japanese-style bridge
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so that you can paint dozens of pictures of this particular motif.
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I think it's about really zeroing in on nature
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but also the present moment
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and the richness of visual perception when you open yourself up to it
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and engage in looking hard at one thing.
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American impressionists addressed the gamut of subjects
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addressed by the French impressionists.
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They were interested in urban life,
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but the garden was particularly important to them
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because it was a space where one could go for a retreat, for rejuvenation.
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It was kind of a private space
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and so they were following in the footsteps or following the inspiration
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of impressionist practitioners like Claude Monet.
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From the mid-1880s many American artists made the pilgrimage to Giverny.
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Their favourite hotel built an artists' studio
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and even offered baked beans to make them feel at home.
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Every day, artists headed out to paint the countryside and gardens,
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and some even worked alongside Monet.
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John Leslie Breck was one of the first Giverny colonists
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and he came from a fairly well-off family.
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In Giverny, Monet is said to have never had any pupils.
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He said he wasn't a teacher.
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He said he told artists that wanted to study with him,
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he told them to go to nature.
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But, in fact, one can say that John Leslie Breck was a pupil of Monet's.
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And we have sufficient indication now
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that Monet and Breck went out painting together.
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And Breck watched Monet paint,
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Monet wanted him to watch him paint,
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and Monet would advise him as they were out together.
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Another American artist who made Monet's acquaintance
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was the highly talented and prolific John Singer Sargent.
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John Singer Sargent became a very good friend of Monet's
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and did have a period in the late '80s
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when he was really doing impressionist paintings.
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Other key artists were artists like Theodore Robinson,
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who was the best known of the first generation of Giverny painters.
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And Willard Metcalf, again, was one of the first in Giverny,
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one of the first to actually have a show of his impressionist works
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back in the United States in 1888 in Boston.
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There was very little work by American impressionists
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to be found in Parisian galleries,
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except for some of the American expatriate painters,
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such as Mary Cassatt.
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Mary Cassatt is an interesting figure,
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because she prefigures the period of American impressionism
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that we're really looking at from the 1880s to the 1920s.
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Mary Cassatt is a Philadelphian.
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She studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the 1860s
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at a time when courses were separated by gender.
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She could not study from the nude, for example.
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This was one of the reasons she moved to Paris,
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to get a more progressive art education.
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So Mary Cassatt is the only American
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who exhibits with the French impressionists.
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So, in many ways,
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her approach to impressionism
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is more aligned with the French impressionists
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than it is with the somewhat later generation
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of the American impressionists.
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Mary Cassatt is an artist,
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like many others in the 19th century,
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interested in paint,
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interested in revealing process,
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interested in the spontaneous brushstroke.
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She has taken elements of Degas's work.
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She sees something and then she adapts it so it becomes her own.
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Nobody would ever mistake a Cassatt for a Degas.
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But there are elements, particularly in terms of handling of paint,
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that you realise they share
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and yet they do it in their own way.
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From the 1880s, an increasing number of American artists
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followed Mary Cassatt across the Atlantic to Europe.
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At the same time, the paintings by European impressionists,
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above all those of Monet, Renoir, Manet, Degas and Pissarro,
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were making their way west to the US.
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The question of the market is very interesting,
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because one of the reasons that American impressionism even exists
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is because the dealer Durand-Ruel
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brought French impressionists to New York
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and had an exhibition of their work in 1886,
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and French impressionism gets introduced into the American market.
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1886 is significant
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because of the major exhibition that took place
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at the American Art Association of French painting.
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Before that time, Americans really didn't know what impressionism was.
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The term was very confusing.
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Americans had not certainly seen at home impressionist works.
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Paul Durand-Ruel did send over 18 impressionist works
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to the Foreign Exhibition in Boston in 1883,
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and those works did get a fair amount of press.
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But it was a small number in a large exhibition.
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In 1886, what he sent over was a large exhibition of about 300 works,
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of which 250 were French impressionist paintings.
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That was probably the most often reviewed
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and perhaps the most controversial exhibition held in America,
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in the United States, in the 19th century.
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It took a little while for contemporary collectors
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to really embrace this movement,
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simply because of the formal innovations these artists were making.
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The American collectors find it more easy
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to enjoy this painting than French collectors do,
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because they're not burdened by traditional painting
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and traditional modes of painting.
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Flowers and gardens are one of the most popular and essential,
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intriguing and even challenging tropes of American impressionist artists.
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They came to be very important from their travels to Giverny,
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to meeting Monet,
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and they brought that study of the garden back to the United States
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and became really integral in their approach to plein air painting.
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To understand why the garden became such a focus
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for impressionist painters,
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one has to explore the transition of the garden
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from a provider of food and herbs to a place of pleasure.
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Since the 1700s there had been a flourishing sea trade
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in seeds, bulbs, saplings and plants,
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with American flora leaving the shores of the United States
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and European and Asian flora arriving.
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If anywhere was the hub of that trade,
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it was this small house just outside Philadelphia.
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In many ways, Bartram's Garden
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is probably the most important garden in America
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for the development of American gardens.
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John Bartram is brought up in the local Quaker community.
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He moves here in 1728 and seems to have had the idea
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to begin a very large comprehensive personal garden.
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So partly on his own, partly with help by correspondents in Europe,
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he begins travelling and collecting plants here.
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So from the mid-1730s up until the 1770s at the end of his life,
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this garden is the centre-place
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for transmitting knowledge about plants to Europe
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and also bringing new things from Europe back to America.
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Colonists in America mostly have gardens to feed themselves
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and maybe for a small amount of other purposes,
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so a small amount of medicinal plants,
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common kind of first-aid plants like mints and lemon balm,
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and there might be a very small number of flowering plants.
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So John Bartram is in a very small number of people
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that really have a garden beyond that.
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He's growing plants just because they're flowers
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and because he likes flowers.
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John Bartram is so industrious in sending plants and seeds,
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generally the boxes people are buying are 100 varieties of seeds,
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that the gardens are suddenly overwhelmed in England
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with new plants, a new style of plants,
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and even though each year the boxes have roughly 100 or 105 varieties,
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they change from year to year depending on where Bartram travelled,
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depending on what seeds had a good crop that year.
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America has really had a tradition of gardening,
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obviously started in pioneer days.
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The East Coast in particular has always had an affinity for gardens.
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But it wasn't really until the late 19th century
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that ornamental gardening or gardens as an end in themselves, as a luxury,
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that gardens really blossomed
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and we have what we call the garden movement.
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The garden movement comes out of two really separate and distinct movements
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in the 19th century.
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The City Beautiful movement.
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And the idea is to create beautiful cities filled with green spaces,
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and that's something that you see in Boston,
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that's something that you see in New York,
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here in Philadelphia along the Parkway.
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Now the other sort of tenant
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that comes in to create the garden movement in the United States
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is the influence of the arts and crafts movement in the UK
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and, by extension, arts and crafts cottage gardens.
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The English cottage garden refers back centuries
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to a romantic vision of informal, overflowing, beautiful small gardens.
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Popularised by the British gardener-authors,
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Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson, in books and magazines,
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and in gardens like Robinson's own here in Gravetye, southern England,
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the idea of these "old-fashioned" gardens
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became hugely popular around the world.
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This cottage arts and crafts style becomes embraced in the United States
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in the era after the Centennial Exhibition in 1876.
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That was a celebration of the centennial of the United States
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and it was a time that Americans got very, very engaged
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with their colonial past.
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So, in the UK, Gertrude Jekyll is working on her gardens,
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coming out of the wild gardening style of William Robinson.
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In the United States
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there's the City Beautiful movement going on in the cities
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and then this garden movement
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00:21:56,000 --> 00:22:01,000
which develops at the same time as an explosion of suburbs.
257
00:22:01,080 --> 00:22:03,800
The popularity of gardening, the garden movement,
258
00:22:03,880 --> 00:22:07,280
is very much associated with the rise of a middle class.
259
00:22:07,360 --> 00:22:09,680
There's a growing disparity between rich and poor
260
00:22:09,760 --> 00:22:12,160
but also an emergence with industrialisation
261
00:22:12,240 --> 00:22:16,600
and urbanisation of people who were filling offices to do their work,
262
00:22:16,680 --> 00:22:18,640
but they're also looking for places to live
263
00:22:18,720 --> 00:22:22,480
that can take them back, in some cases, to their agricultural roots.
264
00:22:23,040 --> 00:22:26,320
So the garden itself becomes an important form
265
00:22:26,400 --> 00:22:29,480
for understanding the way that Americans handled
266
00:22:29,560 --> 00:22:32,800
many of the changes associated with modern life.
267
00:22:38,160 --> 00:22:40,480
Millions of new immigrants from Europe,
268
00:22:40,560 --> 00:22:44,880
America's own rural populations transferring to the cities
269
00:22:45,000 --> 00:22:49,800
and newly freed black slaves moving north from the southern states
270
00:22:49,880 --> 00:22:55,400
all caused overcrowding in the tenement blocks of north-eastern cities.
271
00:22:57,360 --> 00:23:01,280
The more the USA industrialised and urbanised,
272
00:23:01,360 --> 00:23:06,000
the more some harked back to a sense of rural calm.
273
00:23:07,240 --> 00:23:13,520
Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Boston have a new influx of immigrants.
274
00:23:14,760 --> 00:23:17,520
There is a lot of anxiety.
275
00:23:17,600 --> 00:23:25,600
So the people who can afford to, this newly emerging middle class,
276
00:23:25,880 --> 00:23:31,560
and by middle class I mean doctors, lawyers, artists,
277
00:23:31,640 --> 00:23:34,880
they now have the ability with the train lines
278
00:23:35,000 --> 00:23:38,840
to build these suburban homes and commute into the city.
279
00:23:38,920 --> 00:23:42,400
So they can live on a train line 20 minutes out of the city
280
00:23:42,480 --> 00:23:43,800
and commute there,
281
00:23:43,880 --> 00:23:45,800
whereas earlier in the 19th century,
282
00:23:45,880 --> 00:23:48,400
they would have lived in their townhouse in the city.
283
00:23:49,000 --> 00:23:51,360
And I think that the garden movement
284
00:23:51,440 --> 00:23:56,360
is a reaction to the industrialisation as well as mass immigration.
285
00:23:57,280 --> 00:24:01,640
I think in the late 19th, early 20th century
286
00:24:01,720 --> 00:24:08,440
Americans of a certain class began to appreciate gardens as a pastime
287
00:24:08,520 --> 00:24:12,880
and also, for the more talented of the people involved in it,
288
00:24:13,000 --> 00:24:15,240
it became a challenge for design
289
00:24:15,320 --> 00:24:21,160
and looking into the history of garden design including, obviously, the UK,
290
00:24:21,240 --> 00:24:25,160
coming up with their own ideas about how to design gardens.
291
00:24:25,240 --> 00:24:28,080
In addition to this, there was this whole other movement
292
00:24:28,160 --> 00:24:33,080
of women, in particular, starting to write about gardens,
293
00:24:33,160 --> 00:24:36,880
the romance of gardens and the therapy of gardens.
294
00:24:37,000 --> 00:24:40,280
They talked about garden design and how they designed their gardens,
295
00:24:40,360 --> 00:24:43,440
how they maintained them, where they got their ideas from.
296
00:24:44,080 --> 00:24:47,320
And also they were all right up to date
297
00:24:47,400 --> 00:24:50,160
on the latest developments in horticulture,
298
00:24:50,240 --> 00:24:55,160
because of the great variety of nurseries and seed houses.
299
00:24:55,800 --> 00:25:00,320
Americans did learn about gardening practices, garden design
300
00:25:00,400 --> 00:25:04,120
and the availability of new kinds of plants and bulbs
301
00:25:04,200 --> 00:25:07,480
by reading a burgeoning garden literature.
302
00:25:07,560 --> 00:25:09,320
There are changes to postal rules
303
00:25:09,400 --> 00:25:11,480
in the United States, I think, at a certain point
304
00:25:11,560 --> 00:25:14,200
that actually allow the mailing of magazines
305
00:25:14,280 --> 00:25:18,000
and that really, along with changes in printing technology,
306
00:25:18,080 --> 00:25:21,400
helps create a much broader market for magazines
307
00:25:21,480 --> 00:25:23,680
that increasingly could include colour pictures
308
00:25:23,760 --> 00:25:26,760
and the kinds of things that would make you really kind of crave
309
00:25:26,840 --> 00:25:30,040
the images of gardens that you saw there.
310
00:25:30,120 --> 00:25:35,200
People get very interested in what the latest, you know, bulbs are.
311
00:25:35,280 --> 00:25:37,680
The Crimson Rambler rose, for example,
312
00:25:37,760 --> 00:25:41,640
that's depicted in an impressionist painting by Philip Leslie Hale
313
00:25:41,720 --> 00:25:44,120
is one of the sort of celebrity varieties
314
00:25:44,200 --> 00:25:47,720
that is promoted in some of those gardening magazines.
315
00:25:47,800 --> 00:25:50,280
So that kind of periodical literature
316
00:25:50,360 --> 00:25:53,680
really affected what people put in their gardens.
317
00:25:53,760 --> 00:25:55,240
I think it's fair to say
318
00:25:55,320 --> 00:26:00,040
that the gardens that you would have seen in America in the 1880s or 1890s
319
00:26:00,120 --> 00:26:03,160
wouldn't have existed 30 or 40 years before.
320
00:26:04,040 --> 00:26:06,160
I think artists would have been thrilled
321
00:26:06,240 --> 00:26:10,000
by the kind of colour combinations that they saw in gardens.
322
00:26:10,080 --> 00:26:12,600
But landscape is a subject in art
323
00:26:12,680 --> 00:26:16,160
that has interested practitioners for centuries.
324
00:26:16,240 --> 00:26:19,360
But really the subjects that were addressed through landscape,
325
00:26:19,440 --> 00:26:22,880
especially in American art, were wilderness subjects,
326
00:26:23,000 --> 00:26:26,920
things that emphasised nature in remote areas.
327
00:26:27,040 --> 00:26:29,680
Sometimes you might have a more pastoral adaptation
328
00:26:29,760 --> 00:26:31,400
where you saw a farm,
329
00:26:31,480 --> 00:26:33,560
but there would have been a lot of green in those.
330
00:26:33,640 --> 00:26:37,240
It wouldn't have been about the sort of chromatic contrast
331
00:26:37,320 --> 00:26:38,680
that you saw in a garden,
332
00:26:38,760 --> 00:26:41,120
and it's only with impressionism,
333
00:26:41,200 --> 00:26:44,240
with this new idea that you could make a painting
334
00:26:44,320 --> 00:26:47,560
about a subject right in front of you,
335
00:26:47,640 --> 00:26:52,840
not something with special historical or mythological or symbolic import,
336
00:26:52,920 --> 00:26:57,360
that you could turn your attention to the beauty right in front of you.
337
00:27:23,640 --> 00:27:26,360
There is nothing new under the sun.
338
00:27:26,440 --> 00:27:29,360
It remains but to have knowledge and execution
339
00:27:29,440 --> 00:27:33,440
to treat the ordinary in the highest and simplest way.
340
00:27:34,440 --> 00:27:36,040
J Alden Weir.
341
00:28:04,080 --> 00:28:09,080
I feel more and more contented with the isolation of country life.
342
00:28:09,160 --> 00:28:14,360
To be isolated is a fine thing and we are all nearer to nature.
343
00:28:14,440 --> 00:28:18,760
I can see how necessary it is to live always in the country,
344
00:28:18,840 --> 00:28:21,080
at all seasons of the year.
345
00:28:22,160 --> 00:28:24,080
John Henry Twachtman.
346
00:28:29,520 --> 00:28:31,880
I think American artists were always asking
347
00:28:32,000 --> 00:28:34,120
what was American about their land
348
00:28:34,200 --> 00:28:39,080
and what kind of art could they produce that would be different from Europe.
349
00:28:39,760 --> 00:28:44,040
In the early 19th century, we had the Hudson River School painters,
350
00:28:44,120 --> 00:28:49,040
led by Thomas Cole and also his student Frederic Church.
351
00:28:49,120 --> 00:28:52,400
They were really looking for landscapes that were unique to America.
352
00:28:52,480 --> 00:28:55,120
So they were often studying in Europe,
353
00:28:55,200 --> 00:29:00,000
but then asking themselves what was American about American art.
354
00:29:00,080 --> 00:29:02,680
So you see them painting scenes of the Catskills,
355
00:29:02,760 --> 00:29:04,400
of the Hudson River Valley,
356
00:29:04,480 --> 00:29:08,880
where they would find still a lot of nature that was untouched.
357
00:29:09,000 --> 00:29:14,360
And they were looking to these landscapes as sources of respite.
358
00:29:14,440 --> 00:29:18,280
They were finding that this untouched wilderness in nature
359
00:29:18,360 --> 00:29:20,760
could provide a lot of peace.
360
00:29:20,840 --> 00:29:24,720
With the completion of the transcontinental railroad,
361
00:29:24,800 --> 00:29:28,040
the nailing of the Golden Spike at Promontory,
362
00:29:28,120 --> 00:29:33,760
San Francisco is connected to New York and the frontier is closed.
363
00:29:34,360 --> 00:29:36,760
There is no frontier any more.
364
00:29:36,840 --> 00:29:42,920
So this idea of the boundless, undiscovered Eden
365
00:29:43,040 --> 00:29:47,800
is not something that Americans are really identifying with any more.
366
00:29:47,880 --> 00:29:53,880
And then we're really at a time when the cities are so industrialised,
367
00:29:54,000 --> 00:30:00,400
artists' colonies as well as garden communities are being developed.
368
00:30:05,080 --> 00:30:08,320
Artists sought the company of like-minded individuals
369
00:30:08,400 --> 00:30:11,360
in locations conducive to painting.
370
00:30:13,360 --> 00:30:16,520
For some it was the memory of Giverny
371
00:30:16,600 --> 00:30:20,160
and the colony that lived and worked in the hotel there.
372
00:30:20,760 --> 00:30:24,760
Certainly for all it was a desire to get back to nature.
373
00:30:25,560 --> 00:30:29,360
Living and breathing something they felt so passionately about
374
00:30:29,440 --> 00:30:32,920
with others who felt exactly the same way.
375
00:30:34,360 --> 00:30:38,600
Thus, at the heart of American impressionism,
376
00:30:38,680 --> 00:30:41,640
were a number of artists' colonies,
377
00:30:41,720 --> 00:30:48,600
notably Old Lyme, Cornish, Appledore, and Weir's Farm.
378
00:30:52,560 --> 00:30:56,400
The American art colonies were definitely started by artists
379
00:30:56,480 --> 00:31:02,000
who spent most of their life in cities doing commissions,
380
00:31:02,080 --> 00:31:04,280
like the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens
381
00:31:04,360 --> 00:31:08,920
who had a workshop in downtown Manhattan.
382
00:31:09,040 --> 00:31:12,720
But remember this was in pre-air-conditioning days
383
00:31:12,800 --> 00:31:16,560
and New York was a sweltering horror in the summer.
384
00:31:16,640 --> 00:31:19,200
So they all were looking for places to go to
385
00:31:19,280 --> 00:31:22,320
and he discovered Cornish, New Hampshire,
386
00:31:22,400 --> 00:31:26,040
and invited all of his friends to come up there and join him.
387
00:31:27,120 --> 00:31:31,520
They went there every summer to escape the heat of the city,
388
00:31:31,600 --> 00:31:36,160
to be with their friends, to relax, to create art,
389
00:31:36,240 --> 00:31:39,600
but I think for many of these artists
390
00:31:39,680 --> 00:31:43,480
gardening was an extension of their artistic practice.
391
00:31:43,560 --> 00:31:46,080
They saw gardening as an art
392
00:31:46,160 --> 00:31:50,680
and they saw what they were doing as painting without brushes.
393
00:31:50,760 --> 00:31:53,680
That's what Anna Lea Merritt called it.
394
00:31:53,760 --> 00:31:58,360
To create a composition through living colour was a challenge for them
395
00:31:58,440 --> 00:32:04,920
and so I think that was an integral part of their interest in colonies.
396
00:32:05,920 --> 00:32:10,240
The art colonies where the impressionists gathered together
397
00:32:10,320 --> 00:32:14,560
were very important because they were a gathering place.
398
00:32:16,040 --> 00:32:19,080
Artists tended to do this, of course, even earlier.
399
00:32:19,160 --> 00:32:22,480
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about artists, American artists,
400
00:32:22,560 --> 00:32:24,800
in Rome in the mid-century,
401
00:32:24,880 --> 00:32:27,520
and he talked about them as keeping each other warm,
402
00:32:27,600 --> 00:32:29,880
and there is something to that.
403
00:32:30,000 --> 00:32:34,440
And particularly the colonies of the impressionists,
404
00:32:34,520 --> 00:32:38,200
because they could go out together and paint together.
405
00:32:51,240 --> 00:32:54,520
One of the most significant of the art colonies
406
00:32:54,600 --> 00:32:57,160
was that hosted by Florence Griswold.
407
00:32:59,320 --> 00:33:04,000
On the Atlantic coast, halfway between Boston and New York,
408
00:33:04,080 --> 00:33:08,720
this boarding house became a home of American impressionist art.
409
00:33:46,040 --> 00:33:50,120
The colony starts here in Old Lyme for a couple of different reasons.
410
00:33:50,200 --> 00:33:54,320
One of them is Florence Griswold who is an extraordinary figure
411
00:33:54,400 --> 00:33:56,720
who created an important salon
412
00:33:56,800 --> 00:34:02,040
for American artists and cultural figures here in rural Connecticut.
413
00:34:02,120 --> 00:34:05,240
Florence was the daughter of a packet ship captain
414
00:34:05,320 --> 00:34:08,440
who travelled back and forth between New York and London
415
00:34:08,520 --> 00:34:11,600
and who retired from the sea in the 1850s.
416
00:34:11,679 --> 00:34:16,840
And so even though she grew up in this town on the Connecticut coast,
417
00:34:16,920 --> 00:34:20,520
her father's profession brought her a perspective on a wider world.
418
00:34:21,199 --> 00:34:23,880
Unfortunately after he retired from the sea
419
00:34:24,000 --> 00:34:26,840
the family fell on somewhat hard times.
420
00:34:26,920 --> 00:34:30,440
She and her mother ran a school in their house for girls
421
00:34:30,520 --> 00:34:33,880
and accepted boarders starting in the late 1870s
422
00:34:34,000 --> 00:34:36,440
and they closed it in the early 1890s
423
00:34:36,520 --> 00:34:40,400
when changes in women's education
424
00:34:40,480 --> 00:34:43,600
made somewhat obsolete the model that they followed here
425
00:34:43,679 --> 00:34:46,440
where women received ornamental training
426
00:34:46,520 --> 00:34:48,679
in needlework and arts like that
427
00:34:48,760 --> 00:34:51,560
and less of a college preparatory education,
428
00:34:51,639 --> 00:34:54,239
which increasingly was what people desired
429
00:34:54,320 --> 00:34:56,000
for the young women in their families.
430
00:34:56,800 --> 00:34:58,600
Florence continued the practice
431
00:34:58,680 --> 00:35:01,640
of welcoming in boarders who weren't students,
432
00:35:01,720 --> 00:35:04,640
and, in that context, she met the mother and the sister
433
00:35:04,720 --> 00:35:07,240
of an artist named Clark Voorhees,
434
00:35:07,320 --> 00:35:11,440
who took back with him to New York what he knew of Old Lyme.
435
00:35:11,520 --> 00:35:14,440
And when he met the artist Henry Ward Ranger
436
00:35:14,520 --> 00:35:16,840
they discussed finding places in the country
437
00:35:16,920 --> 00:35:19,040
where one could find paintable subjects
438
00:35:19,120 --> 00:35:23,400
but also the hospitality that you would need for a nice stay.
439
00:35:25,120 --> 00:35:28,640
Ranger came to Old Lyme in 1899.
440
00:35:28,720 --> 00:35:31,640
He enjoyed his experience here so much,
441
00:35:31,720 --> 00:35:35,160
both personally with Florence Griswold, her bountiful table,
442
00:35:35,240 --> 00:35:37,800
the society of the people who were here,
443
00:35:37,880 --> 00:35:41,760
but also the kinds of sites that he found around town.
444
00:35:41,840 --> 00:35:46,360
He would describe the landscape around here as reminding him of Barbizon.
445
00:35:46,440 --> 00:35:48,920
He loved the oak trees growing in this area
446
00:35:49,040 --> 00:35:54,880
and so he sets out intentionally to create an art colony in this town
447
00:35:55,000 --> 00:35:58,360
and the next year in 1900 with Florence Griswold's permission
448
00:35:58,440 --> 00:36:01,800
he brings back with him a group of artist friends
449
00:36:01,880 --> 00:36:04,040
and the Lyme art colony begins.
450
00:36:11,120 --> 00:36:14,560
Many American impressionist painters were a product of the middle class.
451
00:36:15,320 --> 00:36:17,560
The group that congregated in Old Lyme
452
00:36:17,640 --> 00:36:22,080
were artists who were not at the beginning of their careers.
453
00:36:22,160 --> 00:36:26,280
They were established, stable, married for the most part
454
00:36:26,360 --> 00:36:31,080
and had reputations and were sort of building off and developing them.
455
00:36:33,800 --> 00:36:37,680
Florence really helped American impressionism flourish
456
00:36:37,760 --> 00:36:40,880
by the way that she nurtured this group of artists.
457
00:36:41,000 --> 00:36:44,480
Turning her house over to them, turning her garden over to them
458
00:36:44,560 --> 00:36:50,400
and by living in a place that was an embodiment of the kinds of subjects
459
00:36:50,480 --> 00:36:54,360
that American impressionists were just so eager for.
460
00:36:57,760 --> 00:37:00,040
Artists came here for a variety of reasons
461
00:37:00,120 --> 00:37:02,440
and one of those reasons was the community
462
00:37:02,520 --> 00:37:05,360
provided by the boarding house at Florence Griswold's.
463
00:37:06,040 --> 00:37:09,680
The artists could choose rooms, and often married couples
464
00:37:09,760 --> 00:37:13,760
would take the larger studios and bedrooms downstairs.
465
00:37:13,840 --> 00:37:19,240
Bachelors and sometimes bachelorettes would stay upstairs in smaller rooms.
466
00:37:21,280 --> 00:37:23,040
Meals were held in the dining room
467
00:37:23,120 --> 00:37:27,080
but when it got very hot they would also eat outside on the side porch
468
00:37:27,160 --> 00:37:29,640
and those artists called themselves the "Hot Air Club",
469
00:37:29,720 --> 00:37:33,680
not only because of the heat that would proliferate in the dining room
470
00:37:33,760 --> 00:37:35,880
but also because of the kind of subjects
471
00:37:36,000 --> 00:37:38,880
that they could have casually on the dining room porch.
472
00:37:39,920 --> 00:37:44,800
I think that the conversations that artists had in Old Lyme on the porch
473
00:37:44,880 --> 00:37:46,200
were wide-ranging.
474
00:37:46,280 --> 00:37:48,680
They might have discussed technique
475
00:37:48,760 --> 00:37:51,640
and had disagreements over that, and we know that they did,
476
00:37:51,720 --> 00:37:54,280
but I think they also talked about all aspects
477
00:37:54,360 --> 00:37:56,840
of American culture and politics.
478
00:37:56,920 --> 00:37:59,400
There's a lot of discussion about
479
00:37:59,480 --> 00:38:02,280
what is American culture, what are American values.
480
00:38:02,360 --> 00:38:05,800
Questions that are raised as you have people arriving in larger numbers
481
00:38:05,880 --> 00:38:07,400
from other parts of the world.
482
00:38:07,480 --> 00:38:13,080
And there was a feeling that they had to really assert an American identity
483
00:38:13,160 --> 00:38:18,400
against the kind of plurality that is brought in by immigration,
484
00:38:18,480 --> 00:38:22,640
and what they promote as a kind of American identity
485
00:38:22,720 --> 00:38:26,440
is this New England identity, a kind of Anglo-American identity.
486
00:38:26,520 --> 00:38:28,440
Some artists were really known
487
00:38:28,520 --> 00:38:32,640
for not being shy about discussing their views on immigration
488
00:38:32,720 --> 00:38:34,640
and other sort of hot-button topics
489
00:38:34,720 --> 00:38:38,320
and I'm sure those kinds of things came up in the social setting.
490
00:38:39,360 --> 00:38:40,760
There was a serious atmosphere.
491
00:38:40,840 --> 00:38:43,720
They were serious artists but they were also very jovial.
492
00:38:44,520 --> 00:38:48,120
Childe Hassam, who first arrived in Old Lyme in 1903,
493
00:38:48,200 --> 00:38:52,680
liked to say that it was just the place for high thinking and low living.
494
00:38:54,440 --> 00:38:59,240
They did do a lot of joking around and they would lounge on the porch.
495
00:38:59,320 --> 00:39:03,880
They would play games in the parlour, play dominoes, cards.
496
00:39:04,000 --> 00:39:06,720
There was also a popular game called the Wiggle Game.
497
00:39:07,720 --> 00:39:10,160
One artist would start a drawing or a caricature
498
00:39:10,240 --> 00:39:12,760
and then pass it to the next person
499
00:39:12,840 --> 00:39:15,320
and the goal would be to create a caricature
500
00:39:15,400 --> 00:39:18,400
by the time it reached the end of the table.
501
00:39:19,400 --> 00:39:22,600
So it was a quite jovial, you know, humorous place
502
00:39:22,680 --> 00:39:24,800
full of a lot of camaraderie.
503
00:39:39,000 --> 00:39:42,000
The artists would eat breakfast together in the morning
504
00:39:42,080 --> 00:39:44,040
and maybe discuss their plans for the day
505
00:39:44,120 --> 00:39:48,120
and then go out, throughout, walk around Florence Griswold's property,
506
00:39:48,200 --> 00:39:51,080
to find different sketching spots.
507
00:39:51,760 --> 00:39:56,720
They might bring their portable easels, sketchbooks, paints.
508
00:39:56,800 --> 00:40:00,680
By this time, paint was available in collapsible tubes
509
00:40:00,760 --> 00:40:04,600
which made it quite easy for them to paint en plein air, outside.
510
00:40:04,680 --> 00:40:07,200
And this was very conducive to the impressionist style.
511
00:40:07,280 --> 00:40:10,680
So they would paint in a kind of broken brushwork,
512
00:40:10,760 --> 00:40:13,920
they'd be interested in capturing immediate impressions
513
00:40:14,040 --> 00:40:16,240
of the light changing on the landscape.
514
00:40:17,120 --> 00:40:22,440
Some are very impressionistic, like the way we think of impressionism.
515
00:40:22,520 --> 00:40:25,880
We think of Monet, we think of the light hand,
516
00:40:26,000 --> 00:40:30,160
the brushstrokes, the abandon.
517
00:40:30,640 --> 00:40:33,200
Some of the artists do not have that abandon.
518
00:40:33,280 --> 00:40:37,520
They are more tight in their painting, more academic.
519
00:40:37,600 --> 00:40:39,480
But they are painting out of doors,
520
00:40:39,560 --> 00:40:42,080
they are interested in the garden
521
00:40:42,160 --> 00:40:46,280
and what it can teach them formally about their artistic practice.
522
00:40:47,280 --> 00:40:49,920
I think Florence Griswold's garden was a key part
523
00:40:50,040 --> 00:40:54,320
of why the colony flourished here for a couple of reasons.
524
00:40:54,400 --> 00:40:59,320
One of which was the sort of aesthetic composition that it represented.
525
00:40:59,400 --> 00:41:03,520
It had the kind of look that just screams the New England landscape
526
00:41:03,600 --> 00:41:05,400
of the early 19th century,
527
00:41:05,480 --> 00:41:08,760
which is what these American impressionists were looking for.
528
00:41:08,840 --> 00:41:13,920
It was also a place that gave her the space to accommodate these artists.
529
00:41:14,040 --> 00:41:16,840
She allowed them to build ramshackle studios
530
00:41:16,920 --> 00:41:18,840
out in the gardens and the grounds
531
00:41:18,920 --> 00:41:20,520
and there are descriptions
532
00:41:20,600 --> 00:41:23,880
of how part of what was so delightful about being here
533
00:41:24,000 --> 00:41:27,040
was wandering through this kind of maze of vegetation
534
00:41:27,120 --> 00:41:29,640
before you found yourself at your little studio.
535
00:41:30,320 --> 00:41:34,760
You could go right outside the door and paint the subjects that you saw.
536
00:41:34,840 --> 00:41:38,720
Childe Hassam came here a number of times over a number of years
537
00:41:38,800 --> 00:41:40,840
and loved painting the apple blossoms
538
00:41:40,920 --> 00:41:44,520
that grew outside the door of his studio in Old Lyme.
539
00:41:45,560 --> 00:41:48,720
Most artists, part of the reason they painted
540
00:41:48,800 --> 00:41:52,440
was because they were doing something for which there was a market.
541
00:41:52,520 --> 00:41:55,680
Those who were buying pictures, collecting pictures,
542
00:41:55,760 --> 00:41:58,160
both middle class and upper class,
543
00:41:58,240 --> 00:42:04,200
didn't want the commercial environment of the city on their walls.
544
00:42:04,280 --> 00:42:07,640
And if they couldn't live in nature itself,
545
00:42:07,720 --> 00:42:09,920
they could at least have paintings of it
546
00:42:10,040 --> 00:42:11,640
and garden pictures even more so,
547
00:42:11,720 --> 00:42:15,840
because they would be even more colourful than pure landscapes.
548
00:42:23,640 --> 00:42:27,120
Don't hesitate to exaggerate colour and light.
549
00:42:27,200 --> 00:42:29,680
Don't worry about telling lies.
550
00:42:29,760 --> 00:42:32,560
The most tiresome people, and pictures,
551
00:42:32,640 --> 00:42:35,280
are the stupidly truthful ones.
552
00:42:36,360 --> 00:42:38,360
William Merritt Chase.
553
00:42:42,800 --> 00:42:45,440
The man who goes down in posterity
554
00:42:45,520 --> 00:42:48,120
is the man who paints his own time
555
00:42:48,200 --> 00:42:51,160
and the scenes of everyday life around him.
556
00:42:52,080 --> 00:42:54,480
Childe Hassam.
557
00:43:03,720 --> 00:43:06,280
This is Kalmia by Willard Metcalf.
558
00:43:06,360 --> 00:43:08,520
It's a painting that was done in 1905
559
00:43:08,600 --> 00:43:12,880
and the name of the painting comes from the Latin term for mountain laurel,
560
00:43:13,000 --> 00:43:14,840
Kalmia latifolia.
561
00:43:14,920 --> 00:43:19,640
It's an important painting, because it represents Willard Metcalf's transition
562
00:43:19,720 --> 00:43:24,160
from an earlier style of art that he picked up in France.
563
00:43:24,240 --> 00:43:28,320
He went to Giverny and was actually friendly with Claude Monet,
564
00:43:28,400 --> 00:43:32,240
and he spent several years there off and on in the 1880s
565
00:43:32,320 --> 00:43:35,520
before returning to America in 1888.
566
00:43:35,600 --> 00:43:39,120
And it takes a long time for Metcalf to make the transition
567
00:43:39,200 --> 00:43:41,520
from a kind of softly applied paint,
568
00:43:41,600 --> 00:43:45,280
the sort of richly toned colour palette that he used in France,
569
00:43:45,360 --> 00:43:47,560
and to really kind of assimilate
570
00:43:47,640 --> 00:43:51,520
the example of Monet's version of impressionism.
571
00:43:51,600 --> 00:43:55,440
In fact, it takes Metcalf almost 20 years to do that.
572
00:43:56,120 --> 00:44:03,200
So he was feeling a kind of crisis in his career by the early 1900s.
573
00:44:03,280 --> 00:44:07,800
He talked about how he was suffering nervous anxiety in the city
574
00:44:07,880 --> 00:44:10,520
and needed to go to the country to paint
575
00:44:10,600 --> 00:44:13,400
and he ends up at the art colony in Old Lyme
576
00:44:13,480 --> 00:44:16,720
which is where he painted this picture, right on the Lieutenant River,
577
00:44:16,800 --> 00:44:19,520
behind the boarding house where he stayed.
578
00:44:20,400 --> 00:44:23,000
This was a crucial moment for Metcalf.
579
00:44:23,080 --> 00:44:25,720
It's a period he referred to as his renaissance,
580
00:44:25,800 --> 00:44:30,000
when he throws off what was impeding him and holding him back
581
00:44:30,080 --> 00:44:32,680
and embraces impressionism.
582
00:44:32,760 --> 00:44:36,520
And in this picture that transition is made quite apparent
583
00:44:36,600 --> 00:44:40,520
in the way that the background and the foreground relate to one another.
584
00:44:41,400 --> 00:44:45,840
The background is painted in soft greens and blues and purple tones
585
00:44:45,920 --> 00:44:49,840
which is very reminiscent of works that Metcalf did in France
586
00:44:49,920 --> 00:44:53,720
with these very softly blended and applied colours
587
00:44:53,800 --> 00:44:57,520
and there's a bit of a tension or a contrast in this work
588
00:44:57,600 --> 00:44:59,760
with the bushes of kalmia
589
00:44:59,840 --> 00:45:02,320
that are growing along the banks of the river here.
590
00:45:02,400 --> 00:45:06,160
This is where you see the impressionist coming out of Willard Metcalf,
591
00:45:06,240 --> 00:45:10,160
exploding forth in a kind of impasto that he uses,
592
00:45:10,240 --> 00:45:16,800
laying paint on thick in unmodified dabs to create this burst of flowers.
593
00:45:16,880 --> 00:45:18,920
It's significant that he chose kalmia
594
00:45:19,040 --> 00:45:21,880
as the means for making this transition,
595
00:45:22,000 --> 00:45:25,720
because it was a flower that had a lot of significance
596
00:45:25,800 --> 00:45:28,600
in early 20th-century American culture.
597
00:45:28,680 --> 00:45:30,640
It was a native species.
598
00:45:30,720 --> 00:45:34,720
Old Lyme was an area known for having bounteous groves of mountain laurel
599
00:45:34,800 --> 00:45:37,720
that bloomed each year in late June
600
00:45:37,800 --> 00:45:41,480
and it's a flower that was really embraced by the American impressionists
601
00:45:41,560 --> 00:45:43,280
and embraced in American culture,
602
00:45:43,360 --> 00:45:46,600
because it was seen as embodying American traits,
603
00:45:46,680 --> 00:45:50,200
that it was native to the soil, it was hearty,
604
00:45:50,280 --> 00:45:53,320
its wood was very hard, it was evergreen
605
00:45:53,400 --> 00:45:58,000
and it was spoken of as really kind of exemplifying traits
606
00:45:58,080 --> 00:46:00,480
that Americans applied to themselves.
607
00:46:00,560 --> 00:46:04,480
It's analogised to being as enduring as liberty itself
608
00:46:04,560 --> 00:46:07,520
in some of the periodicals of the time.
609
00:46:07,600 --> 00:46:11,160
The patriotic spirit with which the plant was viewed,
610
00:46:11,240 --> 00:46:13,520
associating it with liberty
611
00:46:13,600 --> 00:46:18,120
and kind of claiming this identity is cemented in 1907,
612
00:46:18,200 --> 00:46:20,400
a couple of years after this picture is painted,
613
00:46:20,480 --> 00:46:24,560
when the flower is named Connecticut's state flower
614
00:46:24,640 --> 00:46:29,120
after a group of women who were part of the garden movement
615
00:46:29,200 --> 00:46:34,240
mobilised thousands of votes in favour of kalmia as that flower.
616
00:47:16,480 --> 00:47:21,200
This period of the garden movement of American impressionism
617
00:47:21,280 --> 00:47:25,240
is completely embedded in what is known as the Progressive Era
618
00:47:25,320 --> 00:47:26,800
in the United States.
619
00:47:26,880 --> 00:47:30,240
The Progressive Era is an era of politics
620
00:47:30,320 --> 00:47:34,320
that goes from the mid-1880s right up until 1920
621
00:47:34,400 --> 00:47:39,080
when American women are finally granted the right to vote.
622
00:47:39,160 --> 00:47:46,240
And it's no accident that this development of garden movement culture
623
00:47:46,320 --> 00:47:51,000
and women's empowerment is happening at the exact same time,
624
00:47:51,080 --> 00:47:56,360
because the garden movement is part of a larger coterie
625
00:47:56,440 --> 00:47:59,000
of Progressive Era developments.
626
00:47:59,560 --> 00:48:01,440
For example, Celia Thaxter,
627
00:48:01,520 --> 00:48:05,760
who is the great poet of the garden in this period,
628
00:48:05,840 --> 00:48:08,320
who grew her own garden at Appledore,
629
00:48:08,400 --> 00:48:12,840
who hosted the artist Childe Hassam there in the summers.
630
00:48:12,920 --> 00:48:15,040
She created a unique partnership
631
00:48:15,120 --> 00:48:18,400
between her gardening practice and her political activity.
632
00:48:18,480 --> 00:48:21,680
She was one of the founders of the Audubon movement.
633
00:48:21,760 --> 00:48:25,560
The Audubon movement was founded during this time period
634
00:48:25,640 --> 00:48:28,320
to protect native species of birds.
635
00:48:28,400 --> 00:48:31,800
So Celia Thaxter, for example,
636
00:48:31,880 --> 00:48:37,680
in the famous painting of her by Hassam, is standing in her garden hatless.
637
00:48:37,760 --> 00:48:43,240
Why ever would a gardener stand in the mid sun without a hat on?
638
00:48:43,320 --> 00:48:47,120
Well, that's not what any gardener I know would do.
639
00:48:47,200 --> 00:48:48,880
The reason she's doing it
640
00:48:49,000 --> 00:48:54,240
is she's doing it as a conscious political act of protest.
641
00:48:54,320 --> 00:48:59,160
At the time, the millinery industry was using fauna.
642
00:48:59,240 --> 00:49:02,240
They were actually using feathers from birds
643
00:49:02,320 --> 00:49:06,280
to construct these elaborate, amazing, late 19th-century hats.
644
00:49:06,360 --> 00:49:10,480
But women like Celia Thaxter who were involved in the Audubon movement said,
645
00:49:10,560 --> 00:49:15,520
"We're losing our native species of birds. We need to protest that."
646
00:49:15,600 --> 00:49:18,760
And having herself photographed and painted hatless
647
00:49:18,840 --> 00:49:21,640
was one of her ways of protesting that.
648
00:49:21,720 --> 00:49:26,160
Now, women gardeners were also very involved
649
00:49:26,240 --> 00:49:33,120
in being proponents of native species, of founding local garden clubs.
650
00:49:33,200 --> 00:49:37,800
It was also a time of emerging professionalisation for women,
651
00:49:37,880 --> 00:49:41,920
so American artists become professional visual artists
652
00:49:42,040 --> 00:49:46,560
but there's also the development of landscape architecture.
653
00:49:46,640 --> 00:49:52,320
And in this period in particular it becomes a moment of opportunity
654
00:49:52,400 --> 00:49:57,440
for American women to become professional landscape architects.
655
00:50:03,640 --> 00:50:06,360
Opportunities for women had been limited.
656
00:50:07,440 --> 00:50:12,480
For example, no woman could seek publicly funded commissions.
657
00:50:14,360 --> 00:50:17,400
But gardening opened up possibilities
658
00:50:17,480 --> 00:50:23,200
and New Yorker Beatrix Farrand was the first woman in the United States
659
00:50:23,280 --> 00:50:26,040
to call herself a landscape gardener.
660
00:50:28,240 --> 00:50:32,480
She did manage to secure herself public commissions,
661
00:50:32,560 --> 00:50:35,160
including one of the White House gardens,
662
00:50:35,240 --> 00:50:37,440
and private commissions like this
663
00:50:37,520 --> 00:50:40,760
at Bellefield along the Hudson River Valley.
664
00:50:43,040 --> 00:50:45,320
Well, Beatrix Farrand was unusual
665
00:50:45,400 --> 00:50:49,080
in that she wasn't necessarily the first female landscape architect,
666
00:50:49,160 --> 00:50:51,640
but she was the first successful one.
667
00:50:51,720 --> 00:50:55,440
She trained privately with Charles Sprague Sargent
668
00:50:55,520 --> 00:50:58,760
who was the famous director of the Arnold Arboretum,
669
00:50:58,840 --> 00:51:02,080
so she knew horticulture like the back of her hand.
670
00:51:02,160 --> 00:51:06,480
And she also, because she grew up in good social circumstances,
671
00:51:06,560 --> 00:51:10,120
was able to travel to Europe for six months
672
00:51:10,200 --> 00:51:15,560
and study all the great gardens in France and England and Germany.
673
00:51:15,640 --> 00:51:17,680
Her garden notebook is very revealing
674
00:51:17,760 --> 00:51:20,520
because right from the start, as an 18-year-old woman,
675
00:51:20,600 --> 00:51:23,600
she had an incredible critical eye
676
00:51:23,680 --> 00:51:26,520
and she could walk into a garden and notice right away
677
00:51:26,600 --> 00:51:28,840
that the maintenance was not up to snuff
678
00:51:28,920 --> 00:51:32,040
and that certain things needed to be done.
679
00:51:32,120 --> 00:51:35,840
She was ruthless, really, in her criticism.
680
00:51:35,920 --> 00:51:41,400
So that's how she trained herself to be really a classical garden designer.
681
00:51:52,440 --> 00:51:57,280
Celia Thaxter plays an equally important part in this story.
682
00:51:59,680 --> 00:52:05,640
Here, on a small island called Appledore, off the New Hampshire coast,
683
00:52:05,720 --> 00:52:09,400
she created an art colony of major significance.
684
00:52:11,360 --> 00:52:15,880
Celia Thaxter is really well known in the United States.
685
00:52:16,000 --> 00:52:19,560
At the time, in the 1800s, she was quite famous.
686
00:52:19,640 --> 00:52:24,560
And her poetry was the primary, first vehicle for her fame,
687
00:52:24,640 --> 00:52:28,000
and then later this artist colony that she built up around her.
688
00:52:28,560 --> 00:52:32,800
The Boston Brahmin, as they're called, the wealthy class,
689
00:52:32,880 --> 00:52:35,280
was growing at this period.
690
00:52:35,360 --> 00:52:38,440
This is a new phenomenon in the United States
691
00:52:38,520 --> 00:52:42,880
and they have time and space in their lives because of their wealth
692
00:52:43,000 --> 00:52:45,920
to enjoy and explore the arts.
693
00:52:46,040 --> 00:52:49,080
The transcendental movement is also beginning now,
694
00:52:49,160 --> 00:52:52,840
so there's a real connection between religion and nature
695
00:52:52,920 --> 00:52:55,640
and the glorification and the restorative nature
696
00:52:55,720 --> 00:52:57,480
of being in the wilderness.
697
00:52:57,560 --> 00:53:01,720
And this is the industrial revolution in the United States
698
00:53:01,800 --> 00:53:04,080
and so the appeal of Appledore Island
699
00:53:04,160 --> 00:53:08,720
was a relief from the dirt and grime of the city.
700
00:53:08,800 --> 00:53:10,880
And also at the time the doctors were saying,
701
00:53:11,000 --> 00:53:15,160
"Go to the ocean and the ocean air will restore you."
702
00:53:16,560 --> 00:53:18,880
The artists who came to Appledore Island
703
00:53:19,000 --> 00:53:24,000
really start with Celia's relationship
704
00:53:24,080 --> 00:53:28,000
to the Boston scene which she marries into.
705
00:53:28,080 --> 00:53:30,120
So her father's business partner,
706
00:53:30,200 --> 00:53:34,720
who helped fund the building of this grand hotel, the Appledore House,
707
00:53:34,800 --> 00:53:36,320
was Levi Thaxter.
708
00:53:36,400 --> 00:53:38,400
He was from a wealthy family
709
00:53:38,480 --> 00:53:43,680
and he introduces Celia to the Boston Brahmin scene.
710
00:53:43,760 --> 00:53:48,640
And she actually meets Hassam in Boston before he ever comes to Appledore.
711
00:53:48,720 --> 00:53:51,840
And this is where she meets most of the artists of the day
712
00:53:51,920 --> 00:53:54,080
who then she invites to Appledore.
713
00:53:56,200 --> 00:54:02,360
The inspiration for her garden is she wants to remember a simpler time.
714
00:54:03,280 --> 00:54:07,040
It doesn't have a purpose. It's just purely aesthetic.
715
00:54:07,640 --> 00:54:12,920
It really reflects how the gardener feels about nature
716
00:54:13,040 --> 00:54:17,920
because it's both contained in the box, in a raised garden bed,
717
00:54:18,040 --> 00:54:20,720
and then it's also wild within that.
718
00:54:20,800 --> 00:54:25,120
She loved when the flowers spilt out of the garden.
719
00:54:25,200 --> 00:54:29,080
And I can imagine the artists really appreciating that
720
00:54:29,160 --> 00:54:34,040
because it led to the beautiful Hassam paintings of Babb's Rock
721
00:54:34,120 --> 00:54:36,680
with the poppies in the front.
722
00:54:38,320 --> 00:54:41,400
Let him but touch a flower,
723
00:54:41,480 --> 00:54:44,920
and lo, its soul is his,
724
00:54:45,040 --> 00:54:47,720
its splendours delicately bright
725
00:54:47,800 --> 00:54:50,720
upon the happy page he lays,
726
00:54:50,800 --> 00:54:53,120
its whole sweet history,
727
00:54:53,200 --> 00:54:56,360
there to live for time's delight.
728
00:54:57,520 --> 00:54:59,320
Celia Thaxter.
729
00:55:01,160 --> 00:55:05,040
Childe Hassam came for over three decades.
730
00:55:05,120 --> 00:55:07,360
He clearly fell in love with the place.
731
00:55:08,160 --> 00:55:12,040
They had a very close relationship, Celia Thaxter and Hassam.
732
00:55:12,120 --> 00:55:15,680
He would stay at her house in some summers.
733
00:55:15,760 --> 00:55:19,760
And he would stay for often the entire summer
734
00:55:19,840 --> 00:55:22,640
but sometimes just a few weeks here and there.
735
00:55:23,600 --> 00:55:28,120
He was clearly so prolific in his work.
736
00:55:28,200 --> 00:55:32,520
There's over 300 paintings painted of just Appledore alone.
737
00:55:32,600 --> 00:55:35,800
It's clearly an inspirational landscape to him.
738
00:55:41,200 --> 00:55:44,720
Art to me is the interpretation of the impression
739
00:55:44,800 --> 00:55:47,400
which nature makes upon the eye and brain.
740
00:55:48,720 --> 00:55:50,280
Childe Hassam.
741
00:55:58,280 --> 00:56:00,000
His relationship to the island
742
00:56:00,080 --> 00:56:03,840
is very deeply connected to his relationship with Celia.
743
00:56:03,920 --> 00:56:05,520
So when Celia was alive,
744
00:56:05,600 --> 00:56:09,800
the first few years of his relationship with the island,
745
00:56:09,880 --> 00:56:13,800
he painted mostly her garden and around her house and around the hotel.
746
00:56:14,920 --> 00:56:19,280
Then after Celia passed away he still kept coming back to the island
747
00:56:19,360 --> 00:56:21,920
and he moved out to the rocky shore,
748
00:56:22,040 --> 00:56:26,080
away from her house to the further reaches of the island.
749
00:57:35,480 --> 00:57:39,200
We must have snow and lots of it.
750
00:57:39,920 --> 00:57:44,040
Never is nature more lovely than when it is snowing.
751
00:57:45,120 --> 00:57:47,400
Everything is so quiet
752
00:57:47,480 --> 00:57:51,000
and the whole earth seems wrapped in a mantle...
753
00:57:51,080 --> 00:57:54,240
All nature is hushed to silence.
754
00:57:55,520 --> 00:57:57,520
John Henry Twachtman.
755
00:58:02,800 --> 00:58:05,800
What this painting and others in this gallery really show
756
00:58:05,880 --> 00:58:10,840
is that the impressionist inspiration from nature didn't cease in the winter.
757
00:58:10,920 --> 00:58:12,920
They found new inspiration
758
00:58:13,040 --> 00:58:16,600
in the changing landscape provided by the snow.
759
00:58:16,680 --> 00:58:20,680
Winter was really a time for respite, for rest.
760
00:58:20,760 --> 00:58:25,400
They found inspiration in this season where the land was iced over,
761
00:58:25,480 --> 00:58:27,880
where the earth could regenerate itself.
762
00:58:28,000 --> 00:58:29,560
It was a time of renewal
763
00:58:29,640 --> 00:58:34,320
and they enjoyed exploring these atmospheric effects,
764
00:58:34,400 --> 00:58:38,240
the effects of light and colour they could find reflected in the snow,
765
00:58:38,320 --> 00:58:42,720
and could experiment with different-coloured shadows.
766
00:58:42,800 --> 00:58:45,520
This scene, which is by John Henry Twachtman,
767
00:58:45,600 --> 00:58:49,320
was painted on his 17-acre farm near Greenwich, Connecticut.
768
00:58:49,400 --> 00:58:51,600
The scene is called Snow
769
00:58:51,680 --> 00:58:55,840
and we can see that he's really employing a kind of tonalist effect.
770
00:58:55,920 --> 00:58:58,320
Although it's an impressionist picture
771
00:58:58,400 --> 00:59:01,720
Twachtman was really drawing on his influence
772
00:59:01,800 --> 00:59:03,880
from French Barbizon painters.
773
00:59:04,000 --> 00:59:08,600
You can also see the influence of James McNeill Whistler in this work.
774
00:59:08,680 --> 00:59:14,120
So he's exploring the effects of snow blowing in the atmosphere,
775
00:59:14,200 --> 00:59:18,560
exploring the effects of colour on the white land.
776
00:59:18,640 --> 00:59:22,520
You can see that the trees are not brown here but actually purple
777
00:59:22,600 --> 00:59:26,200
and that's an effect of the shadows catching the light.
778
00:59:27,360 --> 00:59:29,360
He's exploring a limited palette,
779
00:59:29,440 --> 00:59:35,320
so when you look closely there's not just one white or one shade of colour.
780
00:59:35,400 --> 00:59:38,000
There are different greens, different purples.
781
00:59:38,080 --> 00:59:40,120
He's exploring the shadows.
782
00:59:40,200 --> 00:59:43,640
One can barely see the house that he's painting.
783
00:59:45,080 --> 00:59:48,360
I think the study of light and subject matter
784
00:59:48,440 --> 00:59:51,040
were both important for the impressionists
785
00:59:51,120 --> 00:59:54,640
but it's a combination of what light looks like
786
00:59:54,720 --> 00:59:57,840
falling on a certain subject at a certain time of day
787
00:59:57,920 --> 00:59:59,520
or during a certain season.
788
01:00:00,520 --> 01:00:04,080
Twachtman was part of the group of Ten American Painters
789
01:00:04,160 --> 01:00:06,800
which formed in 1897
790
01:00:06,880 --> 01:00:11,480
when they seceded from the Society of American Artists.
791
01:00:11,560 --> 01:00:14,160
They wanted to create their own club
792
01:00:14,240 --> 01:00:17,040
so that they could exhibit independently
793
01:00:17,120 --> 01:00:21,240
and this group was very important to the history of American impressionism,
794
01:00:21,320 --> 01:00:24,360
especially because the number of members
795
01:00:24,440 --> 01:00:27,400
had very long and important careers.
796
01:00:27,480 --> 01:00:29,040
So there's not only Twachtman,
797
01:00:29,120 --> 01:00:32,080
there's also J Alden Weir,
798
01:00:32,160 --> 01:00:37,800
Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, both of whom spent time in Old Lyme.
799
01:00:39,160 --> 01:00:42,040
They really wanted to paint for art's sake.
800
01:00:42,120 --> 01:00:43,600
They wanted to create art
801
01:00:43,680 --> 01:00:47,360
that didn't have to have a kind of narrative or moral quality,
802
01:00:47,440 --> 01:00:51,080
but to represent everyday scenes that they encountered
803
01:00:51,160 --> 01:00:55,760
and to have authentic reactions to their environment.
804
01:00:57,480 --> 01:00:59,520
Of the Group of Ten,
805
01:00:59,600 --> 01:01:04,160
Childe Hassam is now considered the foremost American impressionist.
806
01:01:05,160 --> 01:01:08,320
His work hangs in Washington's National Gallery
807
01:01:08,400 --> 01:01:12,160
alongside that of Monet, Degas and Renoir.
808
01:01:14,120 --> 01:01:17,440
Hassam stayed for weeks in different colonies,
809
01:01:17,520 --> 01:01:20,040
not only Old Lyme and Appledore
810
01:01:20,120 --> 01:01:25,480
but also the Connecticut farmhouse of fellow painter J Alden Weir.
811
01:01:31,160 --> 01:01:34,000
Having previously studied in Paris,
812
01:01:34,080 --> 01:01:39,200
Weir drew inspiration from nature and the landscape around his farm,
813
01:01:39,280 --> 01:01:42,160
where he lived with his family for 36 years.
814
01:01:44,360 --> 01:01:46,160
Weirplayed host
815
01:01:46,240 --> 01:01:50,560
to artists such as John Henry Twachtman, John Singer Sargent
816
01:01:50,640 --> 01:01:55,480
and another eminent painter, William Merritt Chase,
817
01:01:55,560 --> 01:02:00,360
notable, in a group entirely male, for his portraits of women.
818
01:02:09,480 --> 01:02:12,800
William Merritt Chase has incredible relationships
819
01:02:12,880 --> 01:02:14,480
with the women in his life
820
01:02:14,560 --> 01:02:18,040
and they're very frequently the subject matter of his work.
821
01:02:18,120 --> 01:02:22,280
And his own wife being foremost among those, of course.
822
01:02:22,360 --> 01:02:25,760
But you do see even his former students,
823
01:02:25,840 --> 01:02:28,480
many of whom were women, the majority were women,
824
01:02:28,560 --> 01:02:30,680
and he strongly supported them
825
01:02:30,760 --> 01:02:33,200
in their endeavours to pursue a profession in art,
826
01:02:33,280 --> 01:02:37,680
at a time when to be a woman artist was still not easy.
827
01:02:38,240 --> 01:02:40,800
So you see very strong depictions of women.
828
01:02:40,880 --> 01:02:43,880
If, for example, you think of Lydia Field Emmet's portrait,
829
01:02:44,000 --> 01:02:49,120
it's quite a powerful image of this woman, very proudly standing,
830
01:02:49,200 --> 01:02:51,800
full-length portrait with her hand on her hip.
831
01:02:51,880 --> 01:02:54,440
Then you have the garden scenes
832
01:02:54,520 --> 01:02:56,880
where William Merritt Chase has shown
833
01:02:57,000 --> 01:03:03,040
a very beautiful relationship of women in the landscape.
834
01:03:03,120 --> 01:03:06,400
They're very closely immersed with nature.
835
01:03:06,480 --> 01:03:11,560
They feel very much harmoniously integrated into the scenes.
836
01:03:11,640 --> 01:03:14,720
On the one hand, it almost makes me think about this idea
837
01:03:14,800 --> 01:03:18,240
nature and women.
838
01:03:18,320 --> 01:03:24,160
But I would actually say that I think that William Merritt Chase
839
01:03:24,240 --> 01:03:27,720
is almost a feminist of his day, honestly.
840
01:03:27,800 --> 01:03:31,920
I think that women were really strong subjects for him.
841
01:04:21,720 --> 01:04:24,640
There are several examples in this exhibition
842
01:04:24,720 --> 01:04:27,360
which show the changing role of women.
843
01:04:27,440 --> 01:04:30,560
Women had long been held as objects of the gaze
844
01:04:30,640 --> 01:04:34,400
and this was still a popular subject for painters during this time
845
01:04:34,480 --> 01:04:38,800
but this exhibition shows that women were also becoming actors.
846
01:04:38,880 --> 01:04:40,520
They were associated with flowers
847
01:04:40,600 --> 01:04:45,920
but they could also be actors as gardeners, as writers and as designers.
848
01:04:46,040 --> 01:04:49,840
In the actual physical exhibition when it happened at Philadelphia,
849
01:04:49,920 --> 01:04:52,880
I had a section called The Lady in the Garden.
850
01:04:53,000 --> 01:04:57,560
The Lady in the Garden was sort of a double-edged title
851
01:04:57,640 --> 01:05:04,080
because it was really about these very idealised women as flowers.
852
01:05:04,160 --> 01:05:10,920
And then there's this whole group of images of women on the periphery.
853
01:05:11,040 --> 01:05:15,800
There's a Hassam with a woman silhouetted against her garden
854
01:05:15,880 --> 01:05:18,600
with a fishbowl.
855
01:05:18,680 --> 01:05:20,480
So she's standing there,
856
01:05:20,560 --> 01:05:24,279
she's in this very decorative space with the garden behind her
857
01:05:24,360 --> 01:05:27,840
and looking at the fish swimming in their bowl.
858
01:05:27,920 --> 01:05:31,200
I can't help but think that that's an image
859
01:05:31,279 --> 01:05:35,200
of what women are going through at this time period.
860
01:05:35,279 --> 01:05:38,440
They are trying to emerge out of the house.
861
01:05:38,520 --> 01:05:40,400
We're out of the Victorian era.
862
01:05:40,480 --> 01:05:44,279
There are women who are suffragettes, fighting for their right to vote,
863
01:05:44,360 --> 01:05:49,040
they're becoming professional artists, professional landscape gardeners,
864
01:05:49,120 --> 01:05:55,880
but they do not yet have equality or any real political power.
865
01:05:56,000 --> 01:05:57,640
They're trying to get it.
866
01:05:57,720 --> 01:06:02,880
There are also a lot of images of women reading on this peripheral space.
867
01:06:03,000 --> 01:06:06,720
I think that's important too. The literacy, the empowerment.
868
01:06:06,800 --> 01:06:09,520
It makes you think of all the women writers.
869
01:06:09,600 --> 01:06:13,200
The publishing business is growing by leaps and bounds.
870
01:06:13,279 --> 01:06:17,480
Ladies' Home Journal is the number one publication in America.
871
01:06:17,560 --> 01:06:19,920
It's published in Philadelphia.
872
01:06:20,040 --> 01:06:23,520
House & Garden is started in Philadelphia in 1901
873
01:06:23,600 --> 01:06:28,320
and a lot of the people who are writing for these periodicals are women.
874
01:06:28,400 --> 01:06:31,920
A lot of people who are reading them are women.
875
01:06:32,040 --> 01:06:35,080
So these trends in painting were really reflecting
876
01:06:35,160 --> 01:06:37,680
a lot of social reforms that were happening.
877
01:06:37,760 --> 01:06:41,279
But people had differing reactions to this
878
01:06:41,360 --> 01:06:44,240
and you can see that in some of these paintings.
879
01:06:44,320 --> 01:06:48,279
In many of the paintings you can see women in liminal spaces,
880
01:06:48,360 --> 01:06:51,880
where they're kind of betwixt and between, as they were in life.
881
01:06:52,000 --> 01:06:57,279
They're often in domestic settings or looking outside
882
01:06:57,360 --> 01:06:58,680
and one example of that
883
01:06:58,760 --> 01:07:03,440
would be Childe Hassam's painting Summer Evening from 1886.
884
01:07:03,520 --> 01:07:07,920
You can see he's painted his wife, Maude, by a window
885
01:07:08,040 --> 01:07:11,440
and, although she's inside, she's gazing outside
886
01:07:11,520 --> 01:07:15,520
and he's juxtaposing her with this potted geranium.
887
01:07:15,600 --> 01:07:21,160
So he's emphasising the fact that women were very much interior figures,
888
01:07:21,240 --> 01:07:23,600
figures associated with the home.
889
01:07:23,680 --> 01:07:26,480
But he's also showing a kind of opportunity
890
01:07:26,560 --> 01:07:28,080
by placing her by this window.
891
01:07:28,160 --> 01:07:31,360
Windows in art were always symbolic.
892
01:07:31,440 --> 01:07:34,160
They represent some kind of opportunity,
893
01:07:34,240 --> 01:07:36,040
they're aspirational
894
01:07:36,120 --> 01:07:38,920
and they could be interpreted in various ways.
895
01:07:39,040 --> 01:07:42,080
So by showing this figure gazing outside the window
896
01:07:42,160 --> 01:07:43,840
he's really letting the viewer explore
897
01:07:43,920 --> 01:07:46,480
that she may have some kind of mental faculty,
898
01:07:46,560 --> 01:07:49,120
that these larger societal changes
899
01:07:49,200 --> 01:07:53,360
were coming into something that he wanted to show through his painting.
900
01:07:53,440 --> 01:07:57,040
But still she has her hand on the pot of geraniums,
901
01:07:57,120 --> 01:07:59,800
a kind of domesticated flower,
902
01:07:59,880 --> 01:08:01,520
so it's a painting that would appeal
903
01:08:01,600 --> 01:08:04,840
to both conservative and progressive audiences.
904
01:08:05,800 --> 01:08:08,800
But not all artists were feminists.
905
01:08:08,880 --> 01:08:12,160
A lot of these paintings are not just pretty pictures
906
01:08:12,240 --> 01:08:14,560
or pictures of pretty flowers,
907
01:08:14,640 --> 01:08:17,560
but the artist makes very concerted efforts
908
01:08:17,640 --> 01:08:19,840
to communicate a certain message.
909
01:08:56,600 --> 01:08:59,040
This painting is by Philip Leslie Hale.
910
01:08:59,120 --> 01:09:02,720
It's called The Crimson Rambler and was painted around 1908.
911
01:09:02,800 --> 01:09:05,120
Hale came from a prominent Boston family.
912
01:09:05,200 --> 01:09:10,479
He studied in Boston and also in Paris for five years
913
01:09:10,559 --> 01:09:13,200
and spent summers in Giverny.
914
01:09:13,279 --> 01:09:17,120
In 1902 Hale married fellow artist Lilian Westcott
915
01:09:17,200 --> 01:09:20,520
and they settled outside Boston in a suburb called Dedham,
916
01:09:20,600 --> 01:09:22,279
where he began specialising
917
01:09:22,359 --> 01:09:26,720
in paintings of women in floral environments, like this one.
918
01:09:26,800 --> 01:09:29,640
So we're at a particular point in American art history
919
01:09:29,720 --> 01:09:32,920
where the role of women, as well as the representation of women,
920
01:09:33,040 --> 01:09:34,680
is changing quite drastically.
921
01:09:34,760 --> 01:09:38,399
There are many examples in this gallery where we can see women as actors
922
01:09:38,479 --> 01:09:41,399
but also as objects of the male gaze.
923
01:09:41,479 --> 01:09:45,359
And Philip Leslie Hale painted many paintings
924
01:09:45,440 --> 01:09:50,520
where we can see him equating women as decorative objects and as flowers.
925
01:09:51,479 --> 01:09:55,640
The women's suffrage movement had been under way since the mid-19th century
926
01:09:55,720 --> 01:09:59,760
but some people feel that Hale's specialisation
927
01:09:59,840 --> 01:10:04,840
in painting women in domestic interiors and in floral environments
928
01:10:04,920 --> 01:10:08,640
can be interpreted as a pictorial manifestation
929
01:10:08,720 --> 01:10:11,320
of his opposition to female suffrage.
930
01:10:12,480 --> 01:10:16,040
Here Hale's depicting a very specific variety of rose.
931
01:10:16,120 --> 01:10:20,840
It's a Crimson Rambler which was imported from Japan via Great Britain
932
01:10:20,920 --> 01:10:23,280
for the first time in 1894
933
01:10:23,360 --> 01:10:25,160
and became very popular,
934
01:10:25,240 --> 01:10:28,600
published in gardening magazines and literature at the time.
935
01:10:28,680 --> 01:10:33,000
And Hale is really idealising this plant by aggrandising it.
936
01:10:33,080 --> 01:10:36,200
He gives it a kind of anthropomorphic quality.
937
01:10:36,280 --> 01:10:41,360
He enlarges it to a point where it's almost dwarfing his female sitter.
938
01:10:41,440 --> 01:10:46,480
It's mirroring her pose and takes on its own kind of human quality.
939
01:10:47,600 --> 01:10:51,360
He's also using very specific compositional techniques
940
01:10:51,440 --> 01:10:55,760
to communicate a certain message and to lead our eye around this picture.
941
01:10:55,840 --> 01:10:59,280
So we can see his different uses of red and pinks
942
01:10:59,360 --> 01:11:01,680
that help to move our eye around the picture.
943
01:11:01,760 --> 01:11:06,760
So our eye moves from the red rosebush to the redness of the woman's sash
944
01:11:06,840 --> 01:11:10,000
to the red flowers in her hat
945
01:11:10,080 --> 01:11:13,440
and then down to the pink and red tonality of her lips
946
01:11:13,520 --> 01:11:15,000
to her smiling face
947
01:11:15,080 --> 01:11:16,640
and then back to the rose again.
948
01:11:16,720 --> 01:11:20,880
So there's this kind of circling around the picture that is not accidental.
949
01:11:21,000 --> 01:11:22,720
It's very well thought out.
950
01:11:23,760 --> 01:11:27,080
Still there's a kind of ambiguity to the picture as well.
951
01:11:27,160 --> 01:11:30,160
The woman sits on this porch of her home.
952
01:11:30,240 --> 01:11:31,520
She's a domestic figure
953
01:11:31,600 --> 01:11:35,320
but she's in this position at once inside and outside.
954
01:11:35,400 --> 01:11:37,800
She's also looking to the wider world.
955
01:11:39,040 --> 01:11:42,160
This might look like a pretty picture on the surface
956
01:11:42,240 --> 01:11:45,520
but actually the longer you look the more you notice.
957
01:12:03,040 --> 01:12:07,200
I have not acquired the latest impressionist style
958
01:12:07,280 --> 01:12:13,120
which so ably represents things as seen from a motor car at full speed.
959
01:12:13,200 --> 01:12:18,680
I have been obliged to sit out for many hours daily
960
01:12:18,760 --> 01:12:23,080
in freezing wind and later in burning sun
961
01:12:23,160 --> 01:12:27,040
looking long and carefully at flower and leaf.
962
01:12:28,280 --> 01:12:29,600
Anna Lea Merritt.
963
01:12:44,120 --> 01:12:49,840
There is a large group of women artists working in the garden in this period.
964
01:12:50,840 --> 01:12:56,680
One in particular, Maria Oakey Dewing, was a remarkable garden painter.
965
01:12:56,760 --> 01:13:00,360
She was married to Thomas Wilmer Dewing.
966
01:13:00,440 --> 01:13:05,120
They both lived in the artist colony up in Cornish, New Hampshire.
967
01:13:05,680 --> 01:13:11,480
Her husband paints women as these diaphanous flowers in the garden,
968
01:13:11,559 --> 01:13:16,240
a sort of wonderful, mystical, blue-green palette.
969
01:13:16,720 --> 01:13:20,600
What Maria Oakey Dewing does is she was the gardener.
970
01:13:20,680 --> 01:13:24,320
So she was very dedicated to her garden
971
01:13:24,400 --> 01:13:27,520
and she said that to become a painter of flowers
972
01:13:27,600 --> 01:13:31,880
one must bind oneself in apprenticeship to the garden.
973
01:13:32,000 --> 01:13:35,880
So she was in there for years, working in the garden,
974
01:13:36,000 --> 01:13:41,480
and what is unique about her paintings is she's actually down on the ground.
975
01:13:41,559 --> 01:13:45,040
You can see them all as if you're lying down
976
01:13:45,120 --> 01:13:50,360
and there's no horizon line, there's no sky, it's just the flowers.
977
01:13:50,440 --> 01:13:55,360
And one of the contemporary critics of the time, Royal Cortissoz,
978
01:13:55,440 --> 01:14:00,520
said that what she did was paint portraits of flowers.
979
01:14:00,600 --> 01:14:02,840
And, in fact, they're not still lifes.
980
01:14:02,920 --> 01:14:07,920
They're growing flowers and they're some of the most remarkable paintings.
981
01:14:08,040 --> 01:14:10,600
So these women artists were there.
982
01:14:10,680 --> 01:14:12,280
They are remarkable
983
01:14:12,360 --> 01:14:16,760
but they are less well known than their male counterparts.
984
01:14:16,840 --> 01:14:20,600
I think this period of American impressionism
985
01:14:20,680 --> 01:14:26,880
tells us that women were growing like their fellow workers in other fields
986
01:14:27,000 --> 01:14:29,080
into a professional capacity.
987
01:14:29,160 --> 01:14:31,240
But, of course, it's still an environment
988
01:14:31,320 --> 01:14:35,000
in which they face a lot of prejudice about their art,
989
01:14:35,080 --> 01:14:38,520
including what kinds of subjects are considered acceptable.
990
01:14:38,600 --> 01:14:41,440
And so they make important advances
991
01:14:41,520 --> 01:14:45,400
but they are still ghettoised in terms of their works.
992
01:15:24,720 --> 01:15:27,680
This painting is called The Hovel and the Skyscraper.
993
01:15:27,760 --> 01:15:31,200
It was painted in 1904 by Childe Hassam
994
01:15:31,280 --> 01:15:33,040
and although it is an urban scene
995
01:15:33,120 --> 01:15:38,200
it's included in this exhibition in a section entitled The Urban Garden.
996
01:15:39,000 --> 01:15:42,360
While the word "garden" in the title of the exhibition
997
01:15:42,440 --> 01:15:44,720
makes us think about gardens of private homes,
998
01:15:44,800 --> 01:15:46,680
it's impossible to think about
999
01:15:46,760 --> 01:15:50,440
the role of gardens and American art in this time period
1000
01:15:50,520 --> 01:15:52,840
without thinking about public parks.
1001
01:15:52,920 --> 01:15:57,000
There were people who certainly had access to private spaces
1002
01:15:57,080 --> 01:15:58,880
where they could create their own gardens
1003
01:15:59,000 --> 01:16:01,920
but that wasn't common among people who lived in the cities,
1004
01:16:02,040 --> 01:16:06,360
even among those who were middle class and upper middle class.
1005
01:16:06,440 --> 01:16:09,040
The density of cities like New York,
1006
01:16:09,120 --> 01:16:12,559
which were undergoing a lot of architectural expansion
1007
01:16:12,640 --> 01:16:15,160
to match the growing population at this time,
1008
01:16:15,240 --> 01:16:19,000
meant that buildings were being built up and people lived in apartments.
1009
01:16:19,080 --> 01:16:23,600
There is a need that's recognised in the second quarter of the 19th century
1010
01:16:23,680 --> 01:16:27,880
for a big park as a kind of service to the people of New York
1011
01:16:28,000 --> 01:16:31,559
and after much discussion in the 1850s
1012
01:16:31,640 --> 01:16:36,080
two landscape architects, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux,
1013
01:16:36,160 --> 01:16:38,400
develop a plan for Central Park
1014
01:16:38,480 --> 01:16:41,440
which would take a large swath of property
1015
01:16:41,520 --> 01:16:43,720
and set it aside for public use
1016
01:16:43,800 --> 01:16:47,840
but contour it in ways that would bring into the city
1017
01:16:47,920 --> 01:16:50,040
the feeling of wild nature.
1018
01:16:51,280 --> 01:16:56,520
New Yorkers of all classes got access to the outdoors
1019
01:16:56,600 --> 01:16:59,280
but it was also a very contested space.
1020
01:16:59,360 --> 01:17:02,559
Who would be able to use the park? When should it be open?
1021
01:17:02,640 --> 01:17:06,440
Should it only be for the genteel classes or should it be for everybody?
1022
01:17:07,800 --> 01:17:11,120
Hassam lived in a building that combined living and workspace
1023
01:17:11,200 --> 01:17:13,880
on West 67th Street in New York
1024
01:17:14,000 --> 01:17:16,720
and this view is painted from his apartment.
1025
01:17:16,800 --> 01:17:19,360
He's looking east, toward the park.
1026
01:17:19,440 --> 01:17:22,559
The street that you see in the middle ground of the painting
1027
01:17:22,640 --> 01:17:24,120
is Central Park West
1028
01:17:24,200 --> 01:17:28,840
and you can see a sort of pink sky off in the east.
1029
01:17:28,920 --> 01:17:31,840
The title of the painting, The Hovel and the Skyscraper,
1030
01:17:31,920 --> 01:17:38,320
expresses the sort of conflict about the relationship of cities and nature,
1031
01:17:38,400 --> 01:17:41,600
a conflict that Hassam experienced really directly
1032
01:17:41,680 --> 01:17:47,720
because he was going to suffer from the construction of this new building.
1033
01:17:47,800 --> 01:17:51,520
What we're seeing is the perspective from his very own window.
1034
01:17:51,600 --> 01:17:56,480
It's sort of composed in a series of frames with the building around here
1035
01:17:56,559 --> 01:17:58,400
and what we're looking at is a new building
1036
01:17:58,480 --> 01:18:01,040
that's going to block out his view of the park.
1037
01:18:01,120 --> 01:18:05,000
Some people have argued that the hovel that's being alluded to here
1038
01:18:05,080 --> 01:18:08,840
is the building that you see in the park which was the sheepfold,
1039
01:18:08,920 --> 01:18:11,680
a building that was actually built to house a flock of sheep
1040
01:18:11,760 --> 01:18:14,920
that was grazed on the sheep meadow in Central Park.
1041
01:18:15,040 --> 01:18:19,400
But I also question whether Hassam is jokingly referring to the hovel here
1042
01:18:19,480 --> 01:18:21,480
as his own apartment.
1043
01:18:21,559 --> 01:18:24,920
He's the person who's going to be in his little shack,
1044
01:18:25,040 --> 01:18:28,800
overshadowed by this new brick wall of a skyscraper
1045
01:18:28,880 --> 01:18:32,720
that will close off his view and his enjoyment of nature.
1046
01:18:33,720 --> 01:18:37,240
This is an impressionist artwork in a couple of different ways.
1047
01:18:37,320 --> 01:18:40,080
One of them is the real kind of informality
1048
01:18:40,160 --> 01:18:42,320
of the way that this view is framed.
1049
01:18:42,400 --> 01:18:44,320
It's very unceremonious,
1050
01:18:44,400 --> 01:18:47,480
the way that you can see these buildings under construction
1051
01:18:47,559 --> 01:18:49,400
but then they're just cut off at the edge,
1052
01:18:49,480 --> 01:18:53,680
which is a kind of classic characteristic of impressionism.
1053
01:18:53,760 --> 01:18:58,480
Another aspect of this painting that helps it conform with impressionism
1054
01:18:58,559 --> 01:19:01,760
is the brushwork that Hassam deploys.
1055
01:19:01,840 --> 01:19:04,840
He is applying paint directly from the tube,
1056
01:19:04,920 --> 01:19:07,520
it sits right at the surface of the painting,
1057
01:19:07,600 --> 01:19:10,520
and he also is using different kinds of brushwork,
1058
01:19:10,600 --> 01:19:14,360
really drawing our attention to the way that each application of paint
1059
01:19:14,440 --> 01:19:19,360
can really register so much the nature of the space that's being depicted.
1060
01:19:19,440 --> 01:19:23,600
So for the architectural environment of the building behind him
1061
01:19:23,680 --> 01:19:27,120
he's using short, choppy, horizontal, brick-like strokes,
1062
01:19:27,200 --> 01:19:31,360
and then for the soft environment of nature and bare trees
1063
01:19:31,440 --> 01:19:35,400
he's using much longer, more softly blended strokes of paint
1064
01:19:35,480 --> 01:19:39,000
to bring out and amplify the character of the park
1065
01:19:39,080 --> 01:19:42,360
versus the character of the urban environment at its edge.
1066
01:19:57,000 --> 01:20:02,800
In part I think it is the subject matter that is being depicted,
1067
01:20:02,880 --> 01:20:05,559
we are looking at a moment of transformation
1068
01:20:05,640 --> 01:20:08,120
in American society, modernisation.
1069
01:20:09,000 --> 01:20:13,080
So when you think about what kind of subject matter they're depicting,
1070
01:20:13,160 --> 01:20:17,920
it's a much more contemporary view of what life is like,
1071
01:20:18,040 --> 01:20:21,280
whether it's in the urban parks and gardens,
1072
01:20:21,360 --> 01:20:25,240
whether it's the new life of leisure of the rising middle class.
1073
01:20:26,080 --> 01:20:29,720
They're embracing their own culture and time
1074
01:20:29,800 --> 01:20:33,240
in a way that was very different than the past had.
1075
01:20:33,320 --> 01:20:37,120
This is not just about the grandiose landscapes
1076
01:20:37,200 --> 01:20:40,360
but it's really about the interaction of people
1077
01:20:40,440 --> 01:20:43,320
within those landscapes and settings,
1078
01:20:43,400 --> 01:20:46,240
so that it marks a different turning point
1079
01:20:46,320 --> 01:20:50,920
in really capturing this more modern moment in our culture.
1080
01:21:06,559 --> 01:21:08,400
The American impressionist movement
1081
01:21:08,480 --> 01:21:11,559
reveals to us about America at that time
1082
01:21:11,640 --> 01:21:14,880
that there was, I think, a real optimism,
1083
01:21:15,000 --> 01:21:20,320
a sort of faith in the present, that Americans felt about their society.
1084
01:21:24,720 --> 01:21:29,920
industrialisation, urbanisation, fight for women's rights,
1085
01:21:30,040 --> 01:21:35,040
and, as much turmoil and upheaval as those kinds of changes cause,
1086
01:21:35,120 --> 01:21:37,600
there is still, I think, a kind of optimism
1087
01:21:37,680 --> 01:21:41,240
about America and its potential.
1088
01:21:42,160 --> 01:21:46,000
American impressionists are showing the vitality of cities,
1089
01:21:46,080 --> 01:21:50,680
they're showing the beauty of parks and personal gardens,
1090
01:21:50,760 --> 01:21:53,320
and that's not to say that they're doing that
1091
01:21:53,400 --> 01:21:57,840
and ignoring the strife and tumult of the world that they live in,
1092
01:21:57,920 --> 01:22:00,360
but that their very selection of those subjects,
1093
01:22:00,440 --> 01:22:03,280
the sort of touch-points of contemporary culture,
1094
01:22:03,360 --> 01:22:06,520
are still ones that they can view in a positive light.
1095
01:22:07,280 --> 01:22:11,640
So you may be seeking respite from the pressures of urban life in your garden
1096
01:22:11,720 --> 01:22:14,360
but that doesn't mean that you can't celebrate it.
1097
01:22:15,680 --> 01:22:22,880
I think that in times that are tough these gardens were oases.
1098
01:22:23,000 --> 01:22:27,800
The idea that we need this space in which to reflect,
1099
01:22:27,880 --> 01:22:32,000
in which to find beauty again and find meaning.
1100
01:22:32,080 --> 01:22:38,720
In this moment where I think people are seeking beauty and seeking retreat
1101
01:22:38,800 --> 01:22:42,720
and seeking a more peaceful environment,
1102
01:22:42,800 --> 01:22:46,640
in a way carving it out, even within the hustle and bustle
1103
01:22:46,720 --> 01:22:50,280
of these increasingly growing industrialised metropolises
1104
01:22:50,360 --> 01:22:51,920
like New York, for example.
1105
01:22:52,920 --> 01:22:54,640
From looking at these paintings,
1106
01:22:54,720 --> 01:22:57,640
the viewer can really see a window
1107
01:22:57,720 --> 01:23:03,120
into an America that has become an industrialised nation
1108
01:23:03,200 --> 01:23:09,320
but is developing a love of the suburbs and a sort of retreat.
1109
01:23:09,400 --> 01:23:12,440
These artists really were thinking about
1110
01:23:12,520 --> 01:23:16,240
the issues of urbanisation, of immigration.
1111
01:23:16,320 --> 01:23:20,280
This was really in the backdrop, in the minds of everyone.
1112
01:23:20,360 --> 01:23:23,840
The appearance of gardens in American impressionism
1113
01:23:23,920 --> 01:23:27,440
is something that goes beyond their aesthetic appeal
1114
01:23:27,520 --> 01:23:30,080
or how we'll react to them as natural spaces.
1115
01:23:30,720 --> 01:23:34,520
When you look at a landscape that shows a kind of grandmother's garden,
1116
01:23:34,600 --> 01:23:36,280
an old-fashioned garden,
1117
01:23:36,360 --> 01:23:38,600
that it's not just about the flowers
1118
01:23:38,680 --> 01:23:42,800
but the way that these flowers promote a certain vision of American culture,
1119
01:23:42,880 --> 01:23:45,360
that they address topics like immigration.
1120
01:23:45,440 --> 01:23:47,240
And I do think that's something
1121
01:23:47,320 --> 01:23:52,320
that we don't and really can't look at in the same light today,
1122
01:23:52,400 --> 01:23:56,760
that we have much more of a sense of outrage
1123
01:23:56,840 --> 01:24:02,880
about the idea of not accommodating and assimilating and embracing immigration.
1124
01:24:03,000 --> 01:24:06,720
It feels a little bit uncomfortable to talk about these artists' dislike
1125
01:24:06,800 --> 01:24:09,440
of the ways that their world was changing.
1126
01:24:10,559 --> 01:24:15,840
I think those are issues that governed life during this time period
1127
01:24:15,920 --> 01:24:18,400
and the garden was meant to be a space
1128
01:24:18,480 --> 01:24:24,760
where the individual could resolve some of those tensions for themselves.
1129
01:24:24,840 --> 01:24:26,480
The garden landscape
1130
01:24:26,559 --> 01:24:31,400
is a tool for managing contemporary life and remaining part of it.
1131
01:24:34,160 --> 01:24:36,480
For four decades, these artists,
1132
01:24:36,559 --> 01:24:41,240
not only in the north-eastern United States but across the country,
1133
01:24:41,320 --> 01:24:45,320
reflected their time and their society in their art.
1134
01:24:47,160 --> 01:24:51,720
But the 20th century brought new challenges, new developments,
1135
01:24:51,800 --> 01:24:54,440
and new artistic responses.
1136
01:25:00,600 --> 01:25:04,480
poverty, exploitation, oppression.
1137
01:25:07,440 --> 01:25:11,240
Others decided art itself needed a revolution
1138
01:25:11,320 --> 01:25:15,600
and something much more contemporary in approach than impressionism.
1139
01:25:17,800 --> 01:25:22,880
By the 1920s, American impressionism was wilting.
1140
01:25:23,000 --> 01:25:26,840
But to understand the history of American art,
1141
01:25:26,920 --> 01:25:29,520
to understand the history of America,
1142
01:25:29,600 --> 01:25:35,880
one should indeed look to these artists when they were in full bloom.
97176
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