Inspiration at Home: Gardens of Earthy Delights
Artists' gardens have served as refuge, inspiration and subject matter; many welcome visitors both digitally and in person.

Since ancient days, artists have portrayed gardens as their main subject or as a setting; as a metaphor or for close observation; as a prism to study light or seasonal change. Many had their own little Edens. Leonardo da Vinci drew botanicals during his years at the Château du Clos Lucé and garden in Amboise, France, and when he died there, in 1519, he still owned the vineyard in Milan that had been given to him by Duke Ludovico Il Moro.Gustave Caillebotte created an impressive garden in the Paris suburbs, where he entertained Pierre Renoir and Claude Monet, the latter of whom obsessively painted his own gardens at Giverny, 45 miles northwest of Paris.

Monet's English Garden

All these years later, many artists' gardens still exist and, like Giverny, which closed because of the coronavirus pandemic but has now reopened, some can be visited when travel is again possible. Others can be viewed vicariously through videos, books, exhibition catalogs and websites. Some survive only in paint—such as Caillebotte's, seen in "Dahlias: The Garden at Petit-Gennevilliers" (1893) and "Roses in the Garden at Petit-Gennevilliers" (c. 1886).

An easy path to these gardens comes from London's Royal Academy, which for its 2016 exhibition "Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse" made a handful of short videos, available on YouTube. Each is a mix of photos and paintings, narrated by curator Ann Dumas, at gardens nurtured by some artists in the exhibition. On her visit to Pierre Bonnard's garden at Vernonnet, she contrasts its wild style with Monet's planned gardens about three miles away, explaining Bonnard's interest in the "continuum" of flowers in harmony with nature. At Giverny, she shows us that Monet made two gardens: one with neat beds of irises, nasturtiums, roses and other flowers, English-style, and the other one Asian-influenced with water lilies and weeping willows. Some paintings he created there are impressionistically representational, some edge toward the abstract, many portray sheer atmosphere.

Bonnard's Garden

Ms. Dumas takes viewers to Emil Nolde's final garden in Seebüll in northern Germany, which also allows visitors. Focusing on his love for the bold colors of dahlias, sunflowers and hibiscus, she shows how his close-in paintings of these blossoms became near abstractions. She also visits the gardens of Max Liebermann at Lake Wannsee near Berlin and of Henri Le Sidaner at Gerberoy, Picardy, both open to the public.

You can see beyond these brief videos in a 90-minute, slow-moving documentary produced for the show by Exhibition on Screen, available for purchase from the Seventh Art Productions website. While it dwells on Giverny, as did the exhibition, it spends more time than the Academy's videos at the other gardens and adds a look at the lush garden of Joaquín Sorolla's house in Madrid, with its pools of water and Spanish tiles. His "Gardens at the Sorolla Family House" (1920) gives us a glimpse of it.

The exhibition catalog includes additional artists, such as the Expressionist lovers Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, who planted their Bavarian garden in a circle. Her garden paintings, while expressive, tend toward the literal: In "Kandinsky's Garden at Murnau" (1912), for example, the house is easily recognizable and the red blotches are clearly flowers. His verge on the abstract, like "The Garden at Murnau II" (1910), with its blurred borders and off-kilter horizon.

Another excellent guide is the richly illustrated "The Artist's Garden: The Secret Spaces That Inspired Great Art" by Jackie Bennett. It goes to gardens of 10 artists, starting with Leonardo and Rubens, and to locations where groups of artists congregated, like Murnau, where Kandinsky and Münter encouraged friends like August Macke to work in the garden.

Sorolla's House Garden

Ms. Bennett's artists overlap with the Royal Academy's, but she adds others, like Cézanne, Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dalí. Dalí's home in Portlligat, Spain, featuring a white-walled garden that's more Surrealist than floral (though he did favor the tuberose), is among those that welcome visitors. For him and all her artists, Ms. Bennett provides a biography and timeline, a garden schematic, photos, and paintings—like "Portlligat Garden" (1968). She explains how Dalí used his surroundings as settings, as a stage for his "happenings" and as inspiration for his ideas. You can get a glimpse of his garden, too, on a touristic video on YouTube, which shows its lips-shaped seat, sculptures, and long, narrow swimming pool.

While many artists' gardens have been lost, Leonardo's are, well, experiencing a Renaissance. The Amboise château's owners have restored its "spirit," Ms. Bennett writes, though the website makes it look like a theme park, with blow-ups of his paintings hanging from trees and mockups of his various machines. His vineyard in Milan, across the street from the Santa Maria delle Grazie refectory, where he painted "The Last Supper," seems more promising. Leonardo bequeathed this 197-by-574-foot plot to two servants, and it was never redeveloped (though Allied bombers destroyed it in World War II). Last year, his historic grape varieties, replanted in the original pattern, produced their first wine. Coming on the 500th anniversary of his death, it seems a toast to Leonardo, who both wrote about wine and rather enjoyed it, just as he did his garden.