Garden House, Gloucester

What you are looking at

A flower border runs along the edge of a lawn above the sea. In the foreground it erupts in color: tall spires of hollyhocks in pink and white, clusters of pink and crimson phlox, purple and white blooms tumbling over a low rock. A pale path curves along the lawn to the right, past a woven basket left on the grass, toward an old-fashioned lamp post with a white globe and a second bed of flowers. Beyond the garden the harbor opens wide and blue. A white motor launch with an awning rides at anchor near a small wooden landing stage; a lighthouse stands on a low island in the middle distance; a sailboat leans on the water further out. Hills line the far shore under a sky of soft white clouds.

The painting is by Abbott Fuller Graves (1859–1936), the Massachusetts-born painter best known for his garden pictures. A dealer's record from Rehs Galleries lists it as an oil on canvas, signed, measuring 14 by 18 inches. Its date and present owner are not published.

Looking closely

Graves was first trained as a flower painter, and it shows. Each type of bloom is distinct: the stacked, cupped flowers of the hollyhocks are dabbed in vertically up their stems; the phlox are rounded masses built from small strokes of pink, red and white; the low white flowers at bottom left are almost pure impasto. The paint is thick and textured, catching light on the canvas surface.

The composition sets the garden's warm color against the cool blues of sea and sky. The diagonal of the border leads the eye from the foreground blooms out toward the water, while the lamp post at the right and the hollyhocks at the center provide strong verticals. The small boats, the lighthouse and the landing stage give the scene its place: this is a summer garden on a working and holiday harbor.

Abbott Fuller Graves

Graves was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1859. He studied flower painting in Paris and Italy in the 1880s, then figure painting at the Académie Julian under Fernand Cormon and Jean-Paul Laurens. He taught at the Cowles Art School in Boston, where Childe Hassam was a colleague, and later opened his own school, eventually settling at Kennebunkport, Maine, where he died in 1936.

From the 1890s most of his work showed gardens and flowering landscapes, often with figures, painted in a bright palette and thick, broken brushwork influenced by French Impressionism. The coast of New England, including the Cape Ann towns of Gloucester and Rockport, drew many American Impressionists in these years.

Other Graves paintings on this site include Garden at Finisterre, Lady in the Garden and Woman with Flower Basket. For the French painters who shaped his style, see our Impressionism guide.

Where to see it

The painting is in a private collection and has passed through the art market. Museums holding work by Graves include the Brick Store Museum in Kennebunk, Maine, and the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.