The museum blooms / Tulips

Come to a themed evening dedicated to tulips.

Exhibition: Tulips Lecture: Painting and Garden Art Workshop: Bouquet (Floral Arrangement) Refreshments: Daisies What will the lecture be about? Painting serves in garden art as a source of information about the former appearance of old gardens, dating back to the time of the Egyptian pharaohs. Frescoes, oil paintings, gouaches, drawings, and engravings are significant documents. Sometimes they were more about depicting wishes or dreams, and sometimes about propaganda. Paintings of ideal landscapes of the mythical Arcadia inspired the creation of gardens, just as images of Chinese and Japanese gardens did. Painting also contributed to the creation of garden illusions. At the end of the 18th century, Humphry Repton realized that a garden is essentially a spatial, three-dimensional image, and from the term landscape painting, which is a field of painting, he derived the term garden landscape architecture and subsequently landscape gardening. His followers often created garden scenes without plans, simply "painting" a garden picture by arranging trees in lawns, situating water features, and shaping their edges or planting flowers. While Humphry Repton or Prince Hermann Pückler-Muskau and their successors in Great Britain and the German lands "painted" harmonious, modest scenes using native trees, where temples, imitations of ruins, fountains, or sculptures formed visual dominants, a completely new way of "painting" garden images was born in the Lednice park. In Lednice, they were not afraid to plant dark conifers, colorful cultivars of deciduous trees, and a rich variety of trees imported from North America into garden images. Such images no longer needed small architecture and artworks; they were beautiful in themselves. This style, which we call painterly-landscape garden, was cultivated in Lednice throughout the 19th century. The pinnacle of the painterly-landscape garden is the Průhonice Park, whose creator, Count Arnošt Silva-Tarouca, "painted" in a way that remains unmatched to this day. Thanks to the Austro-Hungarian Dendrological Society, this national garden style spread throughout the monarchy. Our gardens at that time were very different from contemporary gardens in Germany, France, or England. After the collapse of the monarchy and amidst the turmoil of the 20th century, the systems of heritage care also diverged. We are fortunate that in the Czech Republic, thanks to our heritage care, a much larger number of painterly-landscape scenes have been preserved than in Austria, Hungary, or Slovakia.