The Garden in Its Glory 1892

Childe Hassam made *The Garden in Its Glory* with watercolor, a medium with its own set of possibilities and limitations. Notice how the watery paint allows for blending and layering, creating a sense of light filtering through the foliage. Hassam’s process involved building up thin washes of color, letting them mingle and bleed together to create soft-edged forms, which gives the garden scene its luminous quality. Watercolor requires a high degree of control. It is unforgiving, in the sense that corrections are difficult to make once the paint has been applied. Perhaps the work is a reflection on the rise of leisure time for middle-class Americans; time spent cultivating nature as an act of pleasure. Understanding the making of this work helps us appreciate how Hassam used his chosen material to evoke the fleeting beauty of a garden in full bloom. The work stands as a testament to the ways in which art and craft intertwine.