Art Review: Public Parks, Private Gardens: Paris to Provence, Metropolitan Museum, New York City

The Parc Monceau, Claude Monet (1878)

Two years ago I reviewed an exhibition at the New York Botanical Gardens dedicated to impressionist painters’ responses to American gardens in the nineteenth century. This summer it was the turn of French artists and the parks and gardens they depicted from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries in this stunning exhibition at the Met.

The Public Garden at Pontoise, Camille Pissaro (1874)

Public Parks, Private Gardens: Paris to Provence tells the story of French painting in the period through a succession of lush natural images, allowing visitors to chart the rise of Naturalism, Impressionism and the Art Nouveau movements as they move through the gallery.

Young Woman Seated on a Sofa, Berthe Morisot (1879)

It also reveals a fascinating story about French culture in the period—the emergence of the now quintessentially Parisian public park, a place where women and men of different classes could mingle, and the quiet seclusion of the private gardens frequented by the artists, their families and their patrons.

Still Life with Pansies, Henri Fantin-Latour (1874)

My favourite images included Claude Monet’s The Parc Monceau (1878) and Camille Pissaro’s The Public Garden at Pontoise (1874), paintings where the park-goers appear to be part of nature themselves; Henri Fantin-Latour’s hyper realistic still lives; and the works of noted female impressionists Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt who turn a feminine gaze upon their women subjects surrounded by flowers.

Garden at Sainte-Adresse, Claude Monet (1867)

The exhibition is centred on a courtyard resplendent with ferns and complete with park benches so you can take in the ambience as well as the art. If you wander in from Central Park you hardly seem to have left the natural world behind at all.

Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly, Mary Cassatt (1880)

Public Parks, Private Gardens: Paris to Provence is entering its final week so, if you’re in New York, go if you can. It’s a wonderful combination of the familiar (the natural joys of summer), with the forgotten (a lost way of life) and the taken-for-granted (the public parks that transformed Paris and other cities in the nineteenth century).

Which NYC exhibitions should the Secret Victorianist review next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Neo-Victorian Voices: Snow Flower and The Secret Fan, Lisa See (2005)

While reading most of the novels in my Neo-Victorian Voices series I’ve felt like I’m returning to a familiar world. Even if the authors of the twenty-first century have different sensibilities and interests than those of the nineteenth, including lesbian liaisons, magical circuses and mechanical octopuses against their Victorian backdrops, there is much that is the same—familiar social structures, story stakes, etiquette.

But in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Lisa See transported me to a new world, the Hunan Province in mid-nineteenth-century China. This is a culture with gender segregation more absolute than in your typical Victorian marriage plot, a culture in which young girls undergo excruciating (and vividly described) footbinding to render them attractive husbands they won’t see until their wedding nights, where women communicate the stories of their lives in a secret language, nu shu, before their words are burned upon their deaths.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005)

The novel is the story of Lily and the most meaningful relationship of her life. This relationship isn’t with her husband, who might as well be from a different planet, but with her ‘old same’ or laotong, Snow Flower, a girl from a more prestigious family who share’s Lily’s birth year and month, if not her fate.

See does an incredible job of bringing Lily to life through prose that maintains the pretence that it could have been translated. She explores the cruelties of her characters’ lives without turning them into mouthpieces for contemporary Western ideals. And, through an entirely first person narrative, she prompts us to understand Lily more clearly than she does herself, while maintaining our empathy for her, bringing the story of a passionate friendship to its agonising and inevitable conclusion.

Lisa See (1955-)

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is historical fiction at its best—informative and transporting, even while timeless in its recognisable humanity.

Which novel would you like to see the Secret Victorianist read next as part of the Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry (2016)

Sarah Perry’s 2016 The Essex Serpent is a fantasy, but not in the way you might expect from its cover. 

Yes, it deals with the apparent reappearance of a mythical river monster in coastal Essex in 1893. Villagers are drowning, missing and hysterical by turns. There’s definitely something lurking beneath the water.

The Essex Serpent (2016)

But the true fantasy of the novel in its depiction of the nineteenth century. Instead of the oppressive and gloomy setting we’ve come to expect in women-focused historical fiction, Perry’s world is one of glorious possibility, where science and religion harmonise, widowhood brings freedom to roam around the beautifully-described countryside unharassed, and true friendships survive even the messiest of sexual encounters.

The blurb led me to expect a thrilling search for a living fossil, but instead what impressed me most was the novel’s strong impact on my visual imagination. Whether she’s describing rustics skinning moles, a consumptive surrounding herself with beautiful shades of blue, a delectable meal or a sheep stuck in the mud, Perry entrances with her language, pulling you into the pages.

Sarah Perry (1979- )

The Essex Serpent is also a master class in point of view, with Perry moving deftly between her characters’ heads, exposing the nuances and misunderstandings that come with many of our social interactions. Her omniscient voice is the most Victorian aspect of a book, which felt to me, despite critical comparisons of the novel to Dickens, Collins and more, largely modern.

Less successful was the central character, Cora Seaborne, who suffers from two issues often seen in protagonists—an underexplored tragic backstory and an inexplicable ability to make most of the supporting characters fall in love with her. Yet the eccentricity of Cora’s interests (in geology and evolution) and her well-rendered relationship with her (presumably autistic) son keep her interesting. I cared about her story despite these minor quibbles.

One thing I loved about the novel was Perry’s refusal to simplify—to make the characters who believed in religion foolish and those who pursue science bastions of rational progress. Every character in the novel believes in something—in the serpent, counting feathers, housing reform, open heart surgery. And that meant that, while the novel does play at the limits of credulity for a ‘realistic’ work of historical fiction, I kept believing to the end.

Which novel would you like the Secret Victorianist to read next as part of the Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.