Woman with Flower Basket

What you are looking at

A young woman stands in the middle of a dense summer garden, looking down at a small bunch of pink roses she holds in both hands. She wears a loose white blouse and long white skirt, and a wide, soft straw hat trimmed in cream and pink, tied under her chin with a black ribbon. Over her right arm hangs a shallow wicker basket already full of cut flowers. Around her, the garden rises higher than her head: tall spikes of pink and white hollyhocks on the left, clusters of pink phlox, red flowers and blue bellflowers on the right. Behind, a blue-green haze of trees and a patch of sky close the view. The signature, "Abbott Graves," is at lower right.

The artist

Abbott Fuller Graves (1859–1936) was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and trained in Boston and in Paris. He began as a painter of flowers and still lifes, and became one of the best-known American painters of gardens, especially the old-fashioned dooryard gardens of New England. In the 1890s he settled in Kennebunkport, Maine, where he painted and taught for the rest of his life. Like many American artists of his generation, he absorbed the bright palette and broken brushwork of French Impressionism, but kept a firmer drawing of the figure.

Garden pictures with a young woman in white were a staple of American Impressionism around 1900–20, and Graves painted many variations. The date and current owner of this particular canvas are not documented in the sources we have checked.

Close looking

Graves's background as a flower painter shows. Each hollyhock is a cluster of separate, cupped blossoms, painted with a loaded brush in pink and white over darker green, and the bellflowers at lower right are clearly drawn bells of blue-violet. The figure, by contrast, is painted more broadly: the white dress is laid in with long strokes of white, cream and pale blue, and the shadows under the hat are warm and soft.

Notice how the composition works. The pale figure sits in the center like a vertical column, and the colors of the garden, pink, red and blue, are arranged around her in a loose ring. The roses in her hands repeat the pink of the hat and the hollyhocks, linking her to the garden. Light falls from the upper left, catching her hat brim and her sleeve.

Where to see more

See other works by the artist in the catalogue, Lady in the Garden, Garden at Finisterre and Garden House Gloucester, and his page, Abbott Fuller Graves. For the French models behind this kind of picture, compare Monet's Woman in the Garden.