The Painter's Garden: Design, Inspiration, Delight

Gardens are refuges, ideal and protected places, almost always enclosed, often artificial, occasionally wild. An artist's view of a garden, his own garden, will show it to be a special place, a locus amoenus, as well as a source for smaller pleasures--single plants to be depicted with botanical precision in all of their beauty. The spectrum of work gathered here ranges from medieval gardens of Eden, depicted by Albrecht Durer and his contemporaries, to Peter Paul Rubens's courtly, gallant games in a royal park, Van Gogh's gnarled trees in the courtyard of a sanatorium and a video installation by Fischli & Weiss. Each is more than a mere landscape. It is a view of an artist's ideal, as imagined and experienced in the world and drawn in finished work--a view of the soul. Includes work by Max Beckmann, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Max Ernst, Jean-Honore Fragonard, Lucien Freud, Caspar David Friedrich, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Klee, Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Edward Munch, Emil Nolde, Peter Paul Rubens, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Antoine Watteau. All told, 400 blooming dreams, opulently illustrated.