From leisure and relaxation to wilderness and human decay, the garden has been an intriguing signifier of a number of artistic concepts throughout history. A new exhibit at the Graves Gallery in Sheffield entitled ‘An Earthly Paradise: Gardens in Art’ provides a jumping-off point for these ideas.
Perhaps one of the most significant developments in garden spaces was the transition from private and enclosed, to sprawling edens with a civic function. Gardens were often constructed in courts to emphasise wealth and conquest through the presentation of exotic plants. Certainly, this was the case for many Baroque gardens, such as Louis XIV’s garden at Versailles (now one of the most visited public sites in France) but this is something which continued into 19th century Britain, wherein the flourishing of overseas trade facilitated the import of exotic plants for public display. Whether exposed among civic buildings or encircled as courtyards, the garden has usually signified some form of communal space; in fact, gardens have functioned as a vital part of civic life from as far back as Ancient Egypt.
The gallery itself is situated at the top of a high flight of stairs above a public library, and both the permanent and rotating exhibits rely on council funding and public donation. For me, the display of art so close to a place of books and learning served as a reminder of the importance of keeping spaces like these open and accessible. Certainly, the public garden is one of the most poignant facilitating factors for a community to enjoy culture, and so seemed like a fitting topic for a cultural space with such potential as the Graves.
I found the development of gardens in art and their varying purposes to be a really intriguing topic, but disappointingly I felt the exhibition could have done far more with it. The introduction to the gallery space set up a fascinating topic for exploration, concerning the utility of the garden for leisure, and linking the garden back to its classical roots. I would have liked to have seen these developments and disparities explained further throughout the exhibit. Sadly, in spite of a promising start, I struggled to make sense of the seemingly random order in which the artworks had been placed, and the connections between them. Moreover, although the idea for the exhibition was a good one, I can’t help feeling as if the wrong site was chosen for its genesis. The space was small with no windows for natural light – perhaps had the skylights been uncovered, the feeling of a natural space would have been enhanced and made more suitable for the garden theme. The pastel blue of the walls did well to compliment the rich greens and browns of most of the work, but I felt the linear display restricted the exhibit, and the perspective of garden as entangled wilderness could have been utilised in order to present the work a bit more creatively.
Regardless, the selected works spanned a variety of time periods and mediums, although this could have been better spiced with historical detail. A copy of Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse was available for visitors to read, and the exhibition worked far better when framed as an accompaniment, or prong of this initial project. The gallery was mainly comprised of traditional pieces, boasting Cezanne’s Bassin du Jas de Bouffan, France (1874), and eye-catchingly, a Primavera by The Arundel Society after Botticelli.
Among the more Romantic portrayals of natural space was Thomas Mostyn’s The Enchanted Garden (fig.1). In his typical dream-like style, this work exemplified what I anticipated of this exhibit; the heavy impasto forming a hazy image of the idealised classical garden. Tucked away in the corner was a tiny engraving of The Fall of Adam and Eve by Albrecht Durer, evoking perhaps the most striking garden image in human memory. These pieces confirmed my expectations for the exhibit, but the selection was kept fresh and modern with the inclusion of a couple of screenprints by Ivor Abrahams. The stark contrast of black to green emphasises the fusion of nature with modern infrastructure such as pavements and walls of commercial housing. This seemed jarring when set alongside representations harking back to Romanticism, although Abrahams work was useful when framing the ancient roots of the garden (most notably, Ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian) against its modern counterparts. Abrahams describes the garden as ‘a collective image, a manifestation of consensual desire’; and the garden as an enduring theme across time is something which rings true throughout the exhibition.
Interestingly, desire seems to be something fundamentally at the centre of garden artwork, the earliest conceptions of Adam and Eve having set a very clear precedent for this. In the exhibition, depictions of Eden give way interchangeably to modern manifestations of desire; for example, Ginner’s The Gateway to Nowhere (fig. 3), the intrigue of which relies on the viewer’s desire to discover what lies unknown beyond the gate. As the Graves notes, this appeal increased significantly following the publication of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett in 1911.
Fig. 3 Charles Ginner, The Gateway to Nowhere.
But that’s only one of a multitude of things we can read into garden themed artwork. Many artists cultivated gardens themselves, and that seemed to go hand in hand with creative endeavour.
'An Earthly Paradise: Gardens in Art' is on display at the Graves Gallery until 12 August 2017.
Esther Vincent