Camille Monet and a Child in the Artist's Garden in Argenteuil

Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, born in Toulouse in 1750, was one of many French artists who went to Italy. These artists wanted to study the works of Renaissance masters and to absorb the flavor of the countryside around Rome that had inspired the great seventeenth-century French painters resident there, Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Valenciennes went to Italy...

Gardens were a favorite subject of impressionist painters. Their rich and fecund images of a blooming, apparently natural world, often engulfing the human figures enclosed within it (fig. 9.1), have in their turn become a source of delight today. The huge modern popularity of impressionist renderings of gardens and other landscapes both derives from and fuels a...