The “Impressionist Gardens” is the title of the exhibition that has been launched recently at the Thyssen – Bornesmisza Museum in Madrid. More than 130 paintings from the world’s top museums and artists made a trip to Madrid and were put together in the Thyssen gallery and the Caja Madrid Foundation from November 16th 2010 to February 13, 2011.

This great exhibition takes a look at how gardens were represented in paintings throughout the second half of the 19th century. The exhibition includes impressionist paintings of Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, Caillebotte and Berthe Morisot.  In addition, some great works of the forerunners artist such as Delacroix and Corot are exhibited. Recognized masterpieces of the following generation artists (Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Klimt, Munch and Nolde), are also displayed.

Some of these fantastic paintings are important loans from museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York, the National Gallery of Art of Washington, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Other ones are loans of galleries such as the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, and the Tate, London, as well as private collections.

The exhibition opens at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum with four different sections:  the first one is devoted to the forerunners of the Impressionist gardens; the second, to the public parks, such as the Parc Monceau, the Bois de Boulogne and Trocadero, and small, private gardens that were often created by artists to get inspired. The third one is dedicated to the decorative garden (a place of leisure) and the productive garden (a place of work). The last section analyzes Pissarro’s interest in the subject of the vegetable garden.

The exhibition continues at the Caja Madrid Foundation, where the evolution of the garden as a subject of art in the late work of the French Impressionists is analyze, through the paintings of Monet, Pissarro and Caillebotte and of the Post-impressionist artist including Van Gogh, Klimt, Vuillard, Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec. In the second floor, the exhibition focuses on European and North American naturalist painting of the turn of the century. A separate gallery shows the work of Spanish painters such as Sorolla, Regoyos, Pla, Meifrèn and Anglada-Camarasa. In the last room it is possible to appreciate the transformation of the garden from Post-impressionism to the early 20th-century avant-garde movements such as Fauvism, Cubism and German Expressionism, with painting of Cézanne, Munch, Nolde, Dufy, Braque, Malevich and Ernst.

This wonderful exhibition is curated by Clare Willsdon, reader in the History of Art at the University of Glasgow, Michael Clarke, Director of the National Gallery of Scotland, and Guillermo Solana, Chief Curator of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza.

If you are planning to visit this great exhibition in Madrid, don´t forget to visit our webpage www.rent4days.com and book one of the apartments close to the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum.