In 1964, Esteban Vicente and his wife, Harriet Godfrey Peters, who had married in 1961, bought a Dutch colonial-style farmhouse on Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton, Long Island, where they would henceforth spend eight months of the year until Vicente’s death. Here, Vicente was able to develop one of his great passions other than painting: gardening.

The land they bought (more than 8000 m²) was dotted with several buildings in addition to the main house: a studio, a large barn, two sheds and a guest cottage. Embracing them all, Harriet and Vincent planted a wonderful garden, tended with care by both of them, turning it into their own field of colour. From that moment on, nature became the main focus of Vicente’s interest. He imagined his garden as a sensory experience that was reflected in his works and went beyond the limits of the painting to produce a special feeling of peace and mystical harmony in the viewer.

The aim of this exhibition is to highlight this relationship between Vicente’s works and his garden. In addition, it explores how, throughout art history, many artists have developed a line in painting gardens, but not so many have created their own gardens, tended them and made them their main source of inspiration. The exhibition ends with a nod towards the greatest exponent of garden painting in Spain, Joaquín Sorolla.

In 1905, Sorolla bought a plot of land on what is now Avenida General Martínez Campos in Madrid, where he built his house, studio and garden. Sorolla’s garden is structured in three spaces plus an Andalusian courtyard, in the neo-Spanish style. The knowledge he had amassed through painting and visiting other gardens gave him the elements he needed to design his own.

Sorolla made the garden a work of art in itself (always with the help of his wife Clotilde) and a reflection of his own creativity. Art and nature merge in his own particular paradise, a place of encounter, inspiration and retreat, which he began to plant in 1911. From 1916 onwards, it was always present in his paintings, either as the single main theme or as the setting for some of his portraits.

The small but meaningful selection of works in this exhibition, dating from 1916 to 1919, shows us an intimate Sorolla who paints in an atmosphere in which he feels free. This freedom, together with the skill of the mature artist, led to a change in his painting.

Sorolla’s interest in describing this or that flower or in defining architectural styles or ornamental motifs gave way to his passion for experimenting with what he saw. He did away with superfluous elements, seeking out the essence of the painting. He was interested in colour, light, atmosphere, and one can detect a leaning towards abstraction. His brushstrokes are very loose, quick, natural, capturing the light of the moment. He brought plasticity, expressiveness and sensory aspects to the fore. He idealised his own gardens, blending the colours of the leaves of the trees to generate the desired pictorial effects; the gardens are shaped by the materiality of forms and textures. The canvas and reality are fused into one.

In Esteban Vicente, nature was an underlying theme in all his work, but it was from 1964 that his practical attention turned to his own garden. He organised the space by planting masses of native flowers of different colours that formed a field of colour in parallel with his own paintings. Esteban and Harriet created their garden intuitively, with no need for exotic plants, pergolas, canals or other architectural elements. Nature in its purest state, in the style of a natural or wild garden, without symmetries, converted into a remarkably beautiful, romantic place.

The wide selection of works by Esteban Vicente for this exhibition shows the organic nature of his garden. His colour palette suggests sunlight, vegetation, water, air, sky. They are compositionally rich works, with very intense, somewhat softened colours, radiating a burning light and a serene atmosphere. By the end of his career, the only subject that interested Vicente was his garden. He returned to a kind of suggested and suggestive figuration. Just like Sorolla, Vicente stripped the composition of superfluous elements. Structure was reduced to a minimum, the paint would fade away, looking almost transparent. The compositions became more open, free – true odes to life, in which the artist’s virtuosity and skill are evident until the very end. There is no despondency, only strength, vitality and hope.

Sorolla and Vicente’s painting charmed both sides of the Atlantic, which is why this fine project is on show both in America and in Spain in two mirror exhibitions: at the Parrish Art Museum, on Montauk Highway, near where Vicente had his studio home, and at the Esteban Vicente Museum of Contemporary Art, where part of the artist’s legacy is kept.

Ana Doldán de Cáceres

Directora Conservadora del Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente