Garden Scene

A spirited redhead, Blondelle Malone was intrepid. She wrote letters to Mary Cassatt asking advice and won a coveted interview with the reclusive Claude Monet. She boasted to her parents: “He refuses to see every one—especially Americans. . . . He told me he did not like to see people and I was the only one he had received in years. . . He told me to keep on and paint as I see and not as others paint, not to be influenced.”

Although ailing family often beckoned her home to Columbia, South Carolina, Malone benefited from her many years in Paris—where she embraced the Impressionists—and from her extensive travels in Europe and the Far East. Owing to her fresh and colorful canvases, she was acclaimed “the garden artist of America.”