The Artist's Garden: The Secret Spaces That Inspired Great Art

The Artist's Garden features over 20 gardens that have been secret retreat, muse, home and studio to our greatest painters. In their lifetimes, their gardens supplied the inspiration for creative works while today they illuminate their professional motivation and private lives - from Paul Cezanne's house in the south of France to Frederick Childe Hassam at Celia Thaxter's garden off the coast of Maine, USA.

Flowers and gardens have often been the first choice for artists looking for a subject. Claude Monet's garden at Giverny shows how one garden can be the catalyst for hundreds of great paintings. Sometimes a whole village becomes the focus for a colony of artists,as at Murnau in the Bavarian hills of southern Germany and Skagen on the northernmost tip of Denmark.

This book is about the real homes and gardens that inspired these great artists - gardens that can still be visited today.