National Lawn and Garden Month
Get digging in your garden if you want an abundance of flowers like these painted by Maria Oakey Dewing!
Widely admired during her lifetime, the flower paintings of Maria Oakey Dewing seem, in some respects, even more remarkable today. When compared to French floral still lifes of the same time, they appear strikingly original. Whereas Monet, Fantin-Latour, Renoir, and even the fantasy-prone Odilon Redon were all influenced by the still-life tradition of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters, Dewing rejected that tradition unequivocally. To her mind, the careful arrangement of different species of flowers in a vase was an affront to nature and the organic vitality of flowers.
Garden in May is a corner of her garden seen in blooming profusion. The hands-and-knees perspective of a gardener, with no sky or horizon, thrusts us into the flowers' midst to experience their luxuriance first-hand. In the riotous massing of roses and tilting carnations, we feel the wafting of air and the tugging of entwined stems and unseen weeds.
Source: William Kloss. Treasures from the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C. and London: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985).
Pictured: Maria Oakey Dewing, 1845–1927, Garden in May, 1895, oil, 23 5/8 x 32 1/2 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly.
Get digging in your garden if you want an abundance of flowers like these painted by Maria Oakey Dewing!
Widely admired during her lifetime, the flower paintings of Maria Oakey Dewing seem, in some respects, even more remarkable today. When compared to French floral still lifes of the same time, they appear strikingly original. Whereas Monet, Fantin-Latour, Renoir, and even the fantasy-prone Odilon Redon were all influenced by the still-life tradition of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters, Dewing rejected that tradition unequivocally. To her mind, the careful arrangement of different species of flowers in a vase was an affront to nature and the organic vitality of flowers.