Garden Side. From Monet to Bonnard : Enter the Artists' Gardens

Pissarro's house boasted a garden, where his wife Julie grew vegetables that provided food for the family's table. There was also a meadow that opened out onto the fields surrounding the village, where the painter enjoyed observing the countrymen at work. For Pissarro, these men represented the ideal life, in harmony with nature.

In this view of Éragny in the early hours of the morning, the silhouettes of women evoke this human activity that the painter held in such high esteem.

With the sun barely visible, the morning mist and the lingering frost covering the grass, this image gives the subtle impression that the landscape is floating. Pissarro went on to paint this landscape over the course of the thirty years he spent living in Éragny.

This is the same church bell that can be seen in this painting by Léo Gausson, a friend of Pissarro and of his son, Lucien. A regular visitor to the Éragny house and its garden, he depicted it from a viewpoint that Pissarro would also go on to use.

The pointillist technique with separate colors is in line with neo-Impressionist principles, which Pissarro and Gausson would both come to adopt for several years.

He created a wonderful flower garden, which he invited Pissarro to paint in September 1892. "The garden is late, but the flowers are beginning to bloom," said Mirbeau. "I think it's going to be stunning though, and that you'll be able to create some admirable studies. You'll come with your entire painting kit, won't you? This way, you can immortalize my flowers!" This painting is one of four created by Pissarro on that occasion, and is skillfully composed.

In the foreground, there is a vast expanse of flowers …

… juxtaposing the vertical forms of the trees in the background.

Between the two, there is a path leading to the local buildings.

Pissarro's pointillist technique creates a shimmering expanse of colors from these flowered spaces. Everything appears to be in harmony.

In Caillebotte's home in Petit-Gennevilliers, this ambition manifests in the form of decorative panels inspired by the flowers in his garden, intended for use in the home. The house and garden are no longer there today, but a months-long restoration process of the “Parterre de Marguerites” allows us to rediscover its full size and modernity, which demonstrates Caillebotte's original design.

If its original placement remains uncertain, its size suggests that it was used for decoration, covering the upper section of a wall, with a furniture-like element that would have masked the white rectangle left by the artist.

Framed by bindweed borders painted onto the canvas, the “Parterre de Marguerites” combines the decorative repetition of the wallpaper, with the free brushstroke of an Impressionist piece. These thriving flowers strewn across the canvas are also reminiscent of the patterns found in Japanese art, which fascinated Western artists at the time.

Restoring the panels lets us rediscover the hypnotic movement of their surfaces, animated by the winding arrangement of the flowers and the way the light plays on their petals.

As World War I raged on, Monet undertook a series of large decorative compositions focusing on his water lily pond, including this work, which was recently donated to the museum by the Lycée Claude Monet. The Lycée had received it as a gift from Michel Monet, the artist's son. The harmony that emanates from this viewpoint gives an impression of immensity and loss of reference points.

The eye moves over the painted surface, drawn by the water lilies that create a gentle curve on the water's surface, under the curtain of the willow branches. The water and air blend together.

Monet was one of the last survivors of the Impressionist generation. Embarking on a new artistic adventure with his “Water Lilies” series, he rubbed shoulders with young artists, who cast an admiring yet challenging eye over the work of the Impressionists.

In around 1920, Bonnard sketched this scene on the spot after lunch, where his partner Marthe and Claude Monet can be seen sitting at the Giverny dining table.

The Japanese prints from Monet's collection can be discerned from the others hanging on the wall.

The vegetation of the garden can also be seen on the other side of the window.

Progressively distancing himself from the city at the start of the 20th century, the Parisian painter Bonnard was charmed by the green, rolling landscape of the Seine Valley. After experimenting during the Nabis years, where nature was subject to recompositions abolishing the illusion of space and immediacy in his work, Bonnard, immersed in new landscapes, revealed himself to be one of the heirs of Impressionism.

The multitude of colors, with intense yellow, deep blue, ochers and mauves which bathe the sky create a dusky tonal palette, give the impression of a captured moment, like a fleeting memory that has been frozen on the canvas.

However, unlike Monet, Bonnard didn't paint outdoors. In his workshop, he reformulated an observation he had previously made. This is certainly why the untamed garden, despite its impressionistic qualities, feel likes a recomposed moment.

The garden that Bonnard painted here, two years before his death, is that of the villa “Le Bosquet”, which sat in the heights of Le Cannet and which the painter bought in 1926. In this masterpiece, housed in the Musée de l'Abbaye in Saint-Claude, the painter's garden takes on the luxuriance of mythical places, such as the hanging gardens of Babylon. Bonnard transposed a reality that was certainly far more modest through a surreal bloom, creating dazzling light.

The layers, created from the same glistening material, appear to be bonded together, with no concern for depth. The eye runs from one mass to another without any reference points, "the eye bathes in the painting, rests in it, as if seized by a physiological affinity".

Pushed to its climax, the subtle retranscription becomes a subjectless painting, with no motif, "The main subject is the surface, which bears its color, its rules, above objects," wrote Bonnard. Using this concept of fusing the subject in color, the painter evokes the latest of Monet's “Water Lilies”.