by Bruce Sylvester / Troubadour, Thursdays 2 – 4 pm
John Singer Sargent, Villa di Marlia, Lucca: The Balustrade, 1910, The Hayden Collection—Charles Henry Hayden Fune
A perfect museum show for the spring season, Framing Nature: Gardens and Imagination at the Museum of Fine Arts cuts across time, continents and concepts with about 120 paintings, photographs, sculptures, tapestries, scrolls, embroidery and more going from antiquity to the present including works by John Singer Sargent, Japan’s iconic Hokusai and Ansel Adams. Some are grand in scale. On the other hand, Imogen Cunningham has a black-and-white photo of a single magnolia blossom.
Two William Blake watercolors show Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the first garden in the Bible. For that matter, the word paradise derives from ancient Greek and Persian terms for garden or secluded garden.
The moment we enter the show, we encounter subtlety: the sound of footsteps on the gravel at the royal garden of Versailles.
Gardens often, but not always, convey tranquility. A large 16th-century carpet from India shows real and imaginary animals that are not all harmonious. Note the winged elephant with claws on its hooves and a bird perched on its back. The rocks in a Chinese garden represent distant mountains in the background. In their mythology, the gods live in the mountains.
Each room in the show has a theme. Sometimes their seating fits their theme. One bench in particular is imaginative, funny and totally appropriate. One room is devoted to the gardeners who create the gardens.
Another room looks at the relationship between gardens and power. Napoleon’s beloved empress Josephine developed an interest in botany during her youth in Martinique and later established a royal botanical garden. We see a few her porcelain dessert plates, each with a single plant in its center. The sides of her accompanying ice cream coolers portray plants.
Continuing the French element, there are gowns with floral patterns from Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior. From 19th-century France, there are paintings of their private gardens that Claude Monet and Gustave Caillebotte had created. Are they symbolic self-portraits?
Gardens can appeal to our senses of smell. A scent station invites us to sample aromas of a few plants.
The show is an unusual and very successful collaboration among four MFA staffers with totally different specialties joining together to create a whole that manages to be both cohesive and eclectic. Framing Nature: Gardens and Imagination is at the Museum of Fine Arts through June 28. Tickets are for timed entry. It coincides with the 50th anniversary of its annual Art in Bloom festival (May 1- 3) bringing together art from MFA collections—ancient to contemporary—with floral interpretations by New England garden clubs, professional designers and MFA floral volunteers.
Erastus Salisbury Field, The Garden of Eden, about 1860, Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865