‘Four things to see’ is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, a free arts and culture platform that provides access to museums, galleries and cultural spaces around the world on demand. Explore now.
Each week we bring you four of the most interesting objects from the world’s museums, galleries and art institutions, hand-picked to mark significant moments in the calendar.
On 14 November 1840, Claude Monet was born in Paris. His groundbreaking approach to painting gardens – most famously at Giverny, where he designed a garden and set up a studio from which he could paint it – demonstrated that cultivated landscapes could offer a variety of ways to explore light, colour and the passage of time. Monet’s garden paintings broke from traditional botanical illustration or topographical documentation, instead using horticultural spaces as laboratories for capturing heady sensations and atmospheric effects.
Gardens have captivated artists for millennia. They are a territory in which nature meets human design, in which wildness is choreographed and seasons perform according to both natural rhythm and horticultural intention. From ancient Persian paradise gardens to contemporary conceptual landscapes, these spaces embody humanity’s complex relationship with the natural world. They serve simultaneously as retreats from urban life and assertions of control over natural forces, as spaces of contemplation and displays of power. Artists find in gardens not merely pleasant pictures but metaphors for creativity itself – spaces where careful cultivation yields unexpected beauty, where order and chaos are in negotiation. This week we look at four works that celebrate horticulture in very different ways.
Maiko in a Garden (1924), Tsuchida Bakusen
National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
Bakusen’s enigmatic composition is an exercise in visual deception. A serene maiko (a dancing girl or trainee geisha) sits in an impossible garden that defies spatial logic. The pond’s water rises vertically to meet distant trees, while floating clusters of pine needles hover without branches to support them. These deliberate impossibilities suggest the artist’s desire to create his own utopia rather than document the actual grounds of Nanzenji Temple. Click here to find out more.
Springtime (1872), Claude Monet
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
Monet positions his wife Camille beneath blooming lilacs in their garden in Argenteuil, using unblended dabs of colour to capture sunlight filtering through leaves on to her muslin dress. This domestic scene transforms private garden space into an arena of creativity, where the artist experiments with how colour and light can suggest rather than describe natural phenomena. This image represents one of the few surviving records of Camille: Monet’s second wife set out to destroy as many paintings and photographs of her as she could, which gives this relaxed spring scene a certain poignance. Click here to read more.
Plan of the fruit and vegetable garden at the Palace of Versailles, from Views of the Beautiful Houses of France (1688–95), Adam Perelle
Palace of Versailles
This meticulous engraving documents Jean-Baptiste La Quintinie’s extraordinary transformation of Versailles marshland into productive royal gardens, where Louis XIV could oversee dozens of gardeners tending rare fruit and vegetable varieties. The geometric precision reflects absolute monarchy’s approach to nature – total organisational power serving royal pleasure and prestige. The plan reveals how gardens function as political statements, demonstrating a ruler’s capacity to impose order on unruly natural forces while providing sustenance for the court. Click here to discover more.
Gardens of the Generalife (1909), Santiago Rusiñol
Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona
Rusiñol’s romanticised vision of Granada’s Moorish gardens captures Spain’s cultural inheritance in melancholy fashion, painted during a period of national introspection following the 1898 Spanish-American War. His fascination with these 13th-century Nasrid palace gardens began in 1887, and led to numerous paintings celebrating their fountains, cypresses and topiary work as expressions of regional identity. In his hands, Generalife becomes less documentary record than meditation on fading glory, demonstrating how artists might use garden imagery to explore themes of time, loss and cultural continuity. Click here to learn more.
‘Four things to see’ is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, a free arts and culture platform that provides access to museums, galleries and cultural spaces around the world on demand. Explore now.