Unlike a forest or a field, a garden exists because somebody wanted it, and the paintings on this list keep track of who. Some of these gardens were borrowed or rented for a season. Others were planned for the dead, or built by a painter on his own land against the protests of his neighbors.
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How These Were Chosen
A garden painting shows a place that someone planned, and that sets it apart from a landscape. Every bed, path and tree stands where a person decided it should, so the picture records two sets of choices, the gardener's and the painter's.
Painters also liked gardens for practical reasons. A garden brings flowers, water, shade and people into one enclosed space, close at hand, that can be painted day after day. Often it belonged to the painter, to a friend or to a patron.
A work made this list only when its title names a garden, or when the whole scene takes place inside one. A hedge behind a sitter, or a flower bed in the corner of a landscape, was not enough. The twelve span more than 3,200 years.
12. Nebamun tomb chapel painter, Pond in a Garden (about 1350 BC)
Seen from directly above, a pool crowded with fish, birds and lotus flowers fills the center of this garden, and rows of date palms, dom palms and sycamore figs line its edges. Unknown painters made it around 1350 BC for the tomb chapel of Nebamun at Thebes, in Egypt, and the scene survives as a fragment of the chapel wall.
A garden on a tomb wall makes sense once Nebamun's world is clear. He was a scribe in charge of grain collection for the city. A tomb chapel like his was a place where the living came to make offerings in memory of the dead, and the garden painted there looks much like the real gardens of wealthy Egyptians, with borders of flowers and shady rows of trees.
What sets this garden apart is that it was painted to belong to Nebamun in the afterlife, and the wall says so twice. On the right side of the pool, a goddess of the sycamore leans out of her tree to offer him fruit and drinks. On the left, a sycamore fig greets him in hieroglyphs as the owner of the garden. His own figure, which once stood in the scene, is now lost.
The painters gave the plants the same care as the words, down to the dates on the palms, which hang at different degrees of ripeness.
At a Glance
Artist: Unknown painters of the tomb chapel of Nebamun, Thebes
Painted: About 1350 BC
Medium: Paint on plaster
Size: Painted area 73 × 64 cm (29 × 25 in)
Where to see it: British Museum, London
11. Roman painter, Garden Room from the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta (about 30 to 20 BC)
Laurels, myrtles, oleanders, pomegranates and quinces rise against a clear sky on all four walls of a single room, behind a lattice fence and a marble barrier.
An unknown Roman artist painted this garden between about 30 and 20 BC in a villa at Prima Porta, north of Rome, that belonged to Livia, the wife of the future emperor Augustus. The Romans told a strange story about her estate. It began with an eagle dropping a hen into her lap, and it ended with the fall of a dynasty.