#garden

According to Wikipedia he's the one who said a painting, before it's a horse or a woman or a story, is basically flat colours on a surface — and then spent most of his career painting angels and gospel scenes anyway.

Monet reportedly dug a trench in the garden so he could lower a huge canvas down and keep painting the top half without moving it — his soon-to-be wife modeled for all four women, apparently.

Apparently the enormous trees that turn up over and over in his landscapes get traced back to a stint in Italy filling sketchbooks with old villa gardens, or so I've read. Big decorative pictures like this were often ordered to fill a particular wall in somebody's house — furniture, more or less, for people who could afford painted furniture.

Another painter reportedly turned this commission down — a bishop pushing the swing while a nobleman peeks up a lady's skirt being too much for him — so Fragonard took the job instead.

He was known to be an anarchist, and painting people who worked with their hands was part of the politics — not just a pretty subject but a point being made.

According to the Met's own notes, that's not the only woman in this garden — a second one is hidden among the rosebushes at the front, put there on purpose to blend in.

One of the late garden pictures, painted when his eyesight was going badly — cataracts, which he put off having operated on for years. Canvases like this sat around unwanted for decades afterwards, and it's said they only got taken seriously once abstract painting had come along and given people a way to like them.

This is believed to be Matisse's own garden outside Paris, with what's said to be his daughter and a friend having tea — that flat, saturated color was already becoming his signature.

This was the last in a run of seven portraits the same painter made of her over the years. It hung at Versailles first, then apparently passed down to her brother.

Apparently he painted the same pond in his own garden something like two hundred times. By this point his eyesight was going — cataracts — and people still argue about how much that's doing to the colours.