Night Garden

Sylvie Marchand · 1906

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

73 × 60 cm

Marchand's nocturnal garden is a study in how colour can evoke light in near darkness. White flowers — peonies, it is thought — glow against the deep blue-green of summer foliage as if lit from within. The artist painted this work over several nights in her own garden in Giverny, where she was a neighbour and close friend of Monet. The painting challenges the Impressionist orthodoxy that sunlight was the only subject worth pursuing, asserting instead that night has its own luminosity.