American Impressionism

Garden at Finisterre

Abbott Fuller Graves, 1913

Garden at Finisterre is an oil painting by the American Impressionist Abbott Fuller Graves, dated 1913, of a woman in white picking flowers in a dense, sunlit summer garden, with a tower on a hill behind.

Artist: Abbott Fuller Graves
Date: 1913
Medium: Oil on canvas
Movement: American Impressionism

Garden at Finisterre is an oil painting by the American Impressionist Abbott Fuller Graves, dated 1913 in earlier catalogue records. It shows a woman in a white dress gathering flowers in a deep summer border, the plants rising around her almost to shoulder height. The painting is signed at lower right. Its dimensions and present owner are not recorded in the sources available to us, and the exact place it shows has not been confirmed.

What you are looking at

The canvas is upright, and almost all of it is flowers. In the foreground, broad dark leaves and pink and crimson blooms crowd the lower edge. Above them rise spikes of red and coral, drifts of lilac and blue, and clouds of cream and white blossom on the left. Tall green stems, probably hollyhocks or foxgloves, shoot up on the right to the top of the canvas.

The woman stands just right of center, her body turned to the left, reaching into the flowers. She wears a long white dress and a broad straw hat with a dark band, and her face is in shadow. She is almost absorbed by the garden around her, painted with the same loose touches of color.

Behind the garden, the ground falls away toward trees and a bright blue sky. On the hill at the upper left stands a pale tower with a lantern at its top, together with the roof of a house. That tower is the detail most viewers miss, and it may be the key to the title.

Where is Finisterre?

The title is the puzzle. Earlier versions of this page placed the scene in Finisterre (Fisterra) on the coast of Galicia, Spain, and Graves did paint gardens in Spain. The name also recalls Finistère in Brittany, and in the early twentieth century houses and estates in American summer colonies were sometimes given such names. The lighthouse-like tower suggests a coastal setting, but without a documented provenance we cannot say which Finisterre Graves meant.

The artist

Abbott Fuller Graves (1859–1936), born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, trained in Boston and in Paris in the 1880s, and became one of the leading American painters of flowers and gardens. From the 1890s he worked largely at Kennebunkport, Maine, where he settled. His typical subject is exactly this one: a woman in white absorbed in a sunlit garden.

How it was made

Graves builds the picture from small, thick strokes laid side by side, with little blending. The whites of the dress and the cream flowers at left are the brightest points, and he sets them against cooler blues and greens so they appear to vibrate in the sun, a lesson learned from Monet's garden pictures such as Women in the Garden and Garden at Sainte-Adresse.

Where to see Graves's work

Works by Graves are held by the Portland Museum of Art in Maine and other American collections. For more by him here, see Lady in the Garden and Woman with Flower Basket.

Questions & answers

Who painted Garden at Finisterre?

Garden at Finisterre is by Abbott Fuller Graves (1859–1936), an American Impressionist from Massachusetts known for paintings of flower gardens, often with a woman in white. He trained in Boston and Paris and worked mainly in Kennebunkport, Maine. Garden scenes were his specialty.

When was Garden at Finisterre painted?

Catalogue records give the date as 1913, when Graves was in his fifties and at the height of his reputation as a garden painter. We have not been able to confirm the date from a museum or auction record, so it should be treated as provisional.

Where is the garden in Garden at Finisterre?

That is uncertain. The title may refer to Finisterre (Fisterra) in Galicia, Spain, where earlier sources place it, or to another place or house with a similar name. A tower like a lighthouse on the hill behind suggests a coastal setting.

What style is Garden at Finisterre painted in?

It is painted in the American Impressionist style, with thick, broken brushstrokes, bright unblended color and an emphasis on sunlight. Graves learned these methods in Paris and applied them to the lush flower gardens he painted in America and abroad.

More by the artist

Abbott Fuller Graves

All works →

A seaside border of pink and white hollyhocks and phlox runs along a lawn above a blue harbor with a motor launch, a lighthouse and sailboats — Abbott Fuller Graves, Garden House, Gloucester — Garden House, Gloucester
Abbott Fuller Graves

A young woman in a white dress and straw hat holds pink roses, a wicker basket of flowers on her arm, among tall hollyhocks — Abbott Fuller Graves, Woman with Flower Basket — Woman with Flower Basket
Abbott Fuller Graves

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