Artists' Gardens Book

Bill Laws, a professional gardener and a renowned horticultural writer, has here created a rich and visually arresting compendium beautifully describing the relationship between a number of artists and their local landscapes. There has always been a dialogue between Art and Nature and here we see the personal source of some of these conversations in the gardens of 20 important artists including Renoir, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Frida Kahlo. Laws' book arranges each chapter around an artist and their natural environs showing the intimate relationship at work therein. Much of Renoir's later life was spent struggling away in his garden at Les Collettes on the French riviera. Three days before he died he was doggedly working on a still life of apples from his own trees. Monet's famous paintings, which allow us to see through his degrading sight the pleasures he took from his Giverny home, nestle alongside the more formal, personal sculpture park of Carl Milles, the Rubens of modern sculptors. Henry Moore's huge primal pieces at Hoglands in Hertfordshire need their contexts as certainly as Barbara Hepworth's bold, sensual figures in her more isolated home in St Ives in Cornwall. With reproductions of the artists' paintings themselves set alongside some startling photography, Bill Laws has produced a book that gives genuine insight into the work of some key artists and their gardens which is an absolute pleasure to look through and to read. --Nicola HollinsRead More