Features

Good books, old friends

Details

By Kara G. Kvasnicka

Tuesday, November 29, -0001

Hits: 271

But, thanks to this year's lingering warm temperatures, I am still more focused on the colors coming from the ground than the ones falling off the trees.

So before we start carving pumpkins and sipping apple cider, let's squeeze in one last literary garden tour.

Much has been written about French Impressionist artist Claude Monet's garden in Giverny, France. The source for his beloved water lily paintings, it has become a popular tourist attraction.

But what about the settings that inspired the landscapes of Monet's colleagues?

Derek Fell's Renoir's Garden (Simon and Schuster, 1991, 120 pages), gives some well-deserved attention to the little-known garden and landscape in the south of France which motivated Pierre-August Renoir (1841-1919) in the twilight of his career.

Anyone whose interests include historic preservation, gardening, photography or Impressionist art should make the effort to get this out-of-print art book through interlibrary loan from their local library. (Be patient as there are probably not many copies available in the country).

The Genesee District Library owns one copy which was rescued from the donation pile by one of our librarians. I am deeply indebted to her for bringing it to my attention.

Fell is a writer and photographer who has received several awards from the Garden Writers Association of America for his more than 35 garden books and calendars.

Renoir's Garden is his tribute to Les Collettes (the English translation for which is "region of small hills"), the nine-acre estate which was Renoir's primary residence during the last 11 years of his life.

Jacques Renoir, a great grandson, says in his foreword to the book that Les Collettes was to Renoir what Giverny was to Monet: "It was a sanctuary which not only provided subjects for his paintings in his later years, but also gave him a stimulating place to receive visitors."

Of course, the gardens were completely different, reflecting the artists' contrasting views on how nature should be both cultivated and painted.

Fell describes those differences in this study of Renoir's life and work at Les Collettes. Skillfully combining color photographs of the garden as it looks today, black-and-white Renoir family snapshots, reproductions of several Renoir paintings and an incisive text, he evokes the magical ambiance and natural beauty of both Renoir's home and the region of France in which it was located.

Fell explains that Renoir chose to live in the south of France during his old age because its mild climate was better for his severe rheumatism.

Renoir became familiar with Les Collettes, an "old farm set in the midst of terraced vineyards, olive groves and orange orchards," while living in Haut-de-Cagnes, a nearby village overlooking the Mediterranean.

He was especially taken with its "vast, gnarled, fossil-like" olive trees which had survived several centuries and had about them an aspect of the supernatural and surreal.

He bought Les Collettes in 1907 after being told of a developer's scheme to replace the trees with a nursery in which carnations for the tourist trade would be grown.

He and his family moved onto the estate a year later after his wife Aline's dream house was built. The previous owners, an Italian peasant family, were allowed to remain at the property's already existing farmhouse and continue farming the land as they had done for 40 years.

Renoir did not like the plain architectural style Aline had commissioned for her thoroughly modern house, complete with electricity, running water and a telephone.

But its "spectacular views of the mountain and the sea," the formal gardens surrounding the house and groves of several varieties of trees kept him painting even though his hands were almost completely crippled by rheumatism.

Fell gives nostalgic, anecdotal descriptions of daily life for the Renoir family at Les Collettes and describes in vivid detail almost every kind of flower, tree and animal that contributed to the vision of nature Renoir wanted to attain both in his paintings and in his life.

Renoir, unlike Monet, believed in preserving his environment rather than changing it to achieve a certain affect. He painted what he saw rather than what he wanted to see.

While he found great pleasure and many subjects in the formal gardens that were planted at Les Collettes, he made sure that its "inherent wildness" was left intact. Likewise, although he allowed some modernization, he insisted that its aura of an old-world farmhouse in an olive grove be preserved.

The book's inclusion of reproductions of The Garden at Les Collettes (1909) and Landscape at Les Collettes (1914) show that he was much more interested in capturing the untamed forms of the olive trees than the artificial beauty of his gardens.

However, fruit, vegetables and flowers from those gardens were used for many of the still lifes he did at Les Collettes.

Fell provides valuable insights into Renoir's life and paintings. But his stunning photographs are reason enough to check out this book. Through his eyes we see almost every view of and from the estate (interior and exterior) and almost every variety of plant, tree and flower indigenous to the region.

Especially impressive are his photographs of the monster-like olive trees and his close-ups of Renoir's favorite roses and the red poppies that thrive in the arid soil near the Mediterranean. His views of the farmhouse and the umbrella pines that Renoir liked to paint are breathtaking. A real treat is the glimpse he gives us of the cluttered studio where Renoir worked.

A reader could easily spend as much time pondering how Fell translates color and light to film with his camera as did Renoir to canvas with his brush and tubes of paint.

Completing the rich experience of this book are several interesting appendices. These include the plans of the garden in case you want to duplicate it in your own yard on a smaller scale — although our usually colder climate may not cooperate.

Fell also provides a map and an annotated list of gardens to consider visiting in the south of France. If you are planning to take your camera when you go, you will want to study the techniques he suggests for photographing plants and gardens.

Les Collettes is now a public museum and garden, so you can potentially see for yourself its extraordinary beauty. But once you have read this book you will feel as though you have been there already.

If you have difficulty obtaining this book you might try finding two other books Fell has published on Impressionism which are still in print. They are The Impressionist Garden (Random House, 1994) and Impressionist Bouquets (Freidman Fairfax Publishers, 1998).

Kvasnicka, a former East Village Magazine news editor, has been the magazine's contributing editor and research consultant since 1989. She has a master's degree in information and library studies from the University of Michigan and works for the Genesee District Library.

• < Prev
• Next >