089

  • Le Jardin des Tuileries (The Tuileries Gardens)

  • n.d.
  • Emma Ruff (French b. 1884)
  • Oil on canvas
  • 33.0 x 41.2 cm., 13 x 16-1/4"
  • Lent Courtesy of Private Collection in Honor of Dr. Thomas James Goebel through Catherine Carter Goebel, Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts

Essay by Beth Gilmartin, Class of 2008

In Le Jardin des Tuileries, as in Le Jardin du Luxembourg (web gallery 90), Emma Ruff depicted a scene from everyday life, an afternoon at the popular Parisian park. An attentive young man in soldier's uniform converses with the object of his attention, a young lady, possibly the distracted nanny for the children playing in the sand below. Upper class and bourgeois Parisians stroll through the park in the background but are not necessarily the focal point. Small in scale and generally scattered throughout the painting, they share the spotlight with the gardens. The background apartment buildings are distanced through the use of atmospheric perspective, the cooler colors effectively convincing the viewer that they actually recede in space beyond the flat picture plane.

Located in the heart of Paris, the Tuileries have a long history, having been first constructed under Catherine de' Medici as private gardens next to the palace. They were later opened in the center to form an axis that projected outward, culminating in a boulevard leading to the Arc de Triomphe. When the city underwent its nineteenth-century renovation by Napoleon Bonaparte, and the palace was declared a public art museum, this became the grand axis of Paris that was used as the base for the new ground plan (Turner). People could escape the hectic city life in the parks and gardens, if only for a short while, and effectively get back to nature. Both young and old, wealthy and working class came to wander in these beautiful gardens.

This piece is very Impressionistic in the sense that Ruff used small dots of color to create a larger picture, revealed upon closer examination of the flowers and trees. Characteristic of Impressionism, the overall conception becomes more comprehensible when viewed from a distance. The Impressionists aimed not to paint a particular object, but instead to paint the light reflecting off that object. In doing so, they employed new theories on the physics of light, published by Eugène Chevreul, whose recent scientific theories established the color wheel, still accepted today. Shadows were no longer considered black but became the darker complementary colors to light, such as blues and purples opposite the warmer colors of orange and yellow. Light was broken into a myriad of hues and shades depending on the time of day, the weather and the angle of light.