Lady in the Garden

Lady in the Garden is an oil painting by the American Impressionist Abbott Fuller Graves, a specialist in garden scenes. It shows a young woman in a long white dress and straw hat seated on a green garden bench, surrounded by flowering shrubs. The painting is signed at lower left. Its date, size and present owner are not recorded in the sources available to us; it appears to belong to the many garden pictures Graves painted in the decades around 1900.

What you are looking at

The woman sits at the right of the canvas, turned in profile toward the left, gazing out across the garden. Her white dress, high-necked and long-sleeved in the fashion of about 1900–1910, falls in long folds to the ground and catches cool lavender and blue shadows. A wide straw hat trimmed with a yellow ribbon shades her face. One hand rests in her lap; the other hangs over the back of the bench. A few cut roses lie beside her on the seat, as though she had just set them down.

Around her, the garden fills the picture. Behind a pale wooden trellis and rail, masses of pink, crimson and white blossoms, probably roses and phlox, climb against dark foliage. The foreground is a sunlit path, laid in with broad strokes of cream and pale green, crossed by soft shadows from the trees above.

The handling is loose and confident. Graves suggests flowers with single dabs of color rather than drawing them, and he uses the white of the dress as the brightest note in the picture, a classic Impressionist device that makes the figure glow against the surrounding greens.

The artist

Abbott Fuller Graves (1859–1936) was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and trained first in Boston as a painter of flowers. He went to Paris in the 1880s to study, and returned there for further training later in the decade, absorbing the bright palette and broken brushwork of French Impressionism. Back in America he became one of the best-known garden painters of his generation, with studios in Boston and New York, and from the 1890s he spent much of his time in Kennebunkport, Maine, where he settled and died. After about 1891 most of his work shows gardens and flowering landscapes, often with a woman in white, and some depict gardens in Spain and South America.

His women are rarely portraits. They are figures of leisure and calm, placed in the garden as part of the color scheme, much as Claude Monet placed figures in Woman in the Garden or Camille Monet on a Garden Bench.

Meaning

The painting belongs to a genre that was hugely popular in America around 1900: the "genteel" garden picture, celebrating domestic leisure, flowers and summer light. Such scenes offered middle-class buyers an image of order and beauty at a time of rapid industrial change. They also reflect the real fashion for elaborate flower gardens, often tended by women, in New England summer colonies.

Where to see Graves's work

Paintings by Graves are held by museums including the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, and appear regularly at auction. For more by him in the catalogue, see Garden at Finisterre, Woman with Flower Basket and Garden House, Gloucester.