Monet, perhaps the most important painter of gardens, once said he owed his painting “to flowers”. But so many other artists not only created gardens but made them the subject of their work – such as Pissarro, Sargent, Tissot, Kandinsky, Klee, Van Gogh, Klimt and Matisse. The modern garden, transformed by 19th century innovations such as hybridisation, glasshouses and foreign exploration, was part of a great social change to which artists responded from the 1860s onwards. This talk traces the appearance of the garden as a modern phenomenon and the development of new art movements adopting it as their subject.
Lydia was born in Poland and studied for her BA in Fine Art at University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (John Christie Scholarship and the Hatton Award), and an MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She has since divided her time between painting and exhibiting as well as lecturing widely to adult audiences. She has taught at London’s National Gallery for more than 35 years, and intermittently at London’s Tate Gallery and National Portrait Gallery, as well as collections such as Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Hermitage and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
