This is an exploration of two artists' creative dialogue with gardens and nature: the French post-impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) and the contemporary American artist Jennifer Bartlett (b. 1941). Both were avid gardeners, and gardens, especially the ones they created for themselves, had a lifelong influence on both artists' works. Garden views from both inside the house and the outside became become a defining subject. This volume brings together over 45 paintings, drawings, and prints by Bonnard and Bartlett.
Gardens are a recurrent theme throughout Bonnard's oeuvre, from the early days of Le Clos, the Bonnard summer home in the Dauphine, and his first garden at Vernonnet, west of Paris, to his final home, Le Bosquet near Cagnes, which became his favorite place to paint and from which he seldom traveled. Jennifer Bartlett emerged in the mid-1970s to become one of the leading American artists of her time, and one of the first female painters of her generation to be both commercially successful and critically acclaimed. Since the 1990s, Bartlett has been spending her summers in a small cottage near the beach in Amagansett, on Long Island's East End. Like Bonnard's paintings of gardens, Bartlett's In the Garden series continues to reveal its true urgency through of the artist's relationship to nature and dialogue with the many languages in painterly history.