By Ceri Lumley, Archivist
Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny is among the most instantly recognisable across the world. From Monet’s paintings of the water lilies to our current exhibition which features the works of Jean-Marie Toulgouat, great-grandson of Monet by marriage. One of the many pleasures of working with archive collections is that you never quite know what you’re going to be asked for and when our Curator, Emma came to me with the question ‘Do we have anything in the archive for Monet’s garden at Giverny?’, I suspected the answer would be ‘yes’ but, as with any request, you never quite know what you’ll find.
Over the last fifty years or so, throughout his career the photographer Andrew Lawson (born 1945) has captured almost every garden you can name, and the archive, held by the Garden Museum, contains the fruit of his prolific work. As with some of our other collections we are lucky to have the context around individual projects. Lawson’s notebooks and worklogs contain everything from map directions and sketches of photographic set-ups to notes on family and visits to friends, along with his work trips down to dates and times of particular photography sessions.
Lawson returned to Giverny on more than one occasion to photograph the gardens, with notes about visits for 1991, 1992 and 1996 in the accompanying notebooks above. This is evident in the dates on the slides, but also in the photographs themselves; the light is different, the flowers and foliage change, the cool tones of Allium and tulips give way to the late summer and early autumn ‘hot borders’ spilling over with Dahlias and Helianthus. A notebook entry for 17th July 1996 suggests a visit to photograph a standard rose ‘The Fairy’ for which there is an accompanying slide.
From Lawson’s notebooks and logbooks, we know he captured gardens at different times of day, often mornings and evenings, and would visit to photograph those features some gardens were known for, in the case of Giverny, the Irises, the allée lined with sprawling Nasturtium and, of course, the bridges cloaked in white and purple Wisteria with lilypad-dotted water in the foreground. Lawson’s notebooks and worklogs often give an insight into the privileged position garden photographers are in; the notebook entries for Lawson’s visits are brief but the worklog for the first of a two-day visit to Giverny in May 1991 has a simple entry:
“…we drove quickly to Giverny; there by 4.30 and I stayed till 8.0, after crowds had gone, photographing the irises.”
Almost all of the Lawson slides are mounted, and the mounts are often as important as the image themselves in an archive in providing context; whether this is a date, the location or, in the case of the Lawson images the reference numbers used to categorise the subject of the image and when supplying slides to publications.
The Lawson Archive is a business archive, meticulously kept, with detailed information provided by Lawson himself about the slides and supporting material when it was deposited with us. As a result, we can trace individual photographs from their inception in the notebooks and worklogs, to the slide itself right through to the date it was supplied to and returned from a publication and the article in which it was published. Those for Giverny appeared in a book about the house and garden published by Bises and the magazine Good Housekeeping in April 1997.
With the slides there is also an important question of preservation. For such a widely used format, particularly in the late 20th century, colour transparencies like those in the Lawson Archive can have a worryingly short shelf-life and are one of the more unstable archive formats, with colours fading quickly in the wrong storage conditions. Ultimately, as with most archive formats, it’s not possible to preserve a transparency, exactly as it was first created, forever. But with the right cold and relatively dry conditions we can ensure the colour and vibrancy of these slides is retained for as long as possible. Digitisation will also play a key part in preserving and making this collection available to a wider audience.
The delivery books held in the collection contain a wealth of information about the publications the images were supplied to. The sheer volume of images that were supplied shows how, as Lawson himself notes, “In the 1990s gardening became the new fashion, and the number of garden books and magazines in production grew significantly. So did the market for garden images.” This professionalisation of garden photography culminated in the setting up of the Professional Garden Photographer’s Association by Lawson and Jerry Harpur in 1999.
Both Lawson and Harpur’s photographs illustrate some of the best-known designers of the time, present and past including those whose archives we hold in the Archive here at the Garden Museum. Both Harpur and Lawson provided images that feature and are an intrinsic part of the books written by Penelope Hobhouse and Lawson’s notebooks and worklogs are peppered with familiar names of gardens, garden designers and prominent figures from across our collections. Lawson has also provided images for the books of well-known designers Arabella Lennox-Boyd and Tania Compton among others and details of photographs provided for what could now be considered canonical garden texts are found in the delivery books.
Work to catalogue the collection is ongoing and we will be highlighting more stories from the Archive in the coming months. For any questions get in touch at our email address archives@gardenmuseum.org.uk.
—