Join Polly Hill Arboretum docent Nancy Weaver for a special tour to celebrate Polly Hill’s birthday. In memory of Polly Hill and her love of plants, Nancy will tell stories of Polly and highlight some of her favorite places around the Arboretum. Please meet at 10 am at the Visitor Center. The Polly Hill Arboretum is located in West Tisbury on Martha’s Vineyard. Free for Arboretum members, $5 for nonmembers. Register HERE.
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was an American artist, born in Florence and trained in Paris, who spent most of his working life in London. He is best known as the portrait painter of the international elite, where his work captures the style, glamour and anxiety of a society on the cusp of change. These two Gardens Trust talks on January 30 and February 6 will concentrate not on Sargent’s portraiture, but on the studies of gardens and flowers he painted in the English countryside in the mid 1880s, his experiments with Impressionist light and brushwork, and a series of later works which express the beauty and melancholy he found in historic European gardens.
Elaine Kilmurray is Research Director of the John Singer Sargent catalogue raisonné, and co-author of the 9 published volumes of the catalogue (Yale University Press, 1998-2016). She has co-curated exhibitions of Sargent’s work in London, the United States and Italy, and has written and lectured internationally on the artist and related subjects.
This ticket link is for the course of 2 sessions. or you may purchase a ticket for individual sessions, costing £8. [Gardens Trust members may purchase tickets at £10.50 for the series or £6 each talk]. The purchase is through Eventbrite. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days (and again a few hours) prior to the start of the first talk), and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week.
The first talk on January 30 is entitled In an English Country Garden. This talk will consider Sargent’s paintings done in the English countryside during the summers and early autumns of 1885 and 1886, concentrating on the creation of the most important work of those two painting campaigns, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (Tate Britain, London). It will include comparisons with gardens painted by Impressionist artists, and refer to the symbolism of the relevant flowers, to the motif of the garden and to aspects of contemporary garden design. The February 6 talk is entitled The Romance of European Gardens. In the early years of the twentieth century, Sargent traveled extensively in Europe, painting obsessively. The historic gardens of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Corfu were one of his favorite subjects. Their appeal lay in aesthetic beauty, in the dialogue between art and nature, sculpture and vegetation they represented, but also in the sense of time passing and continuity embodied in them. The talk will look at Sargent’s distinctive interpretations in oil and watercolor and the ways in which they reflect contemporary sensibility regarding gardens and garden architecture.
Image: Boboli Gardens, c.1906, Brooklyn Museum of Art, USA
