Yale University Press Podcast Edward Steichen and the Garden
Mar 30, 2026
Sarah Anne McNear, author and curator who organized the Steichen exhibition, explores how gardening shaped the artist's life. She traces his Milwaukee roots, delphinium obsession, and transformative Voulanger garden. Conversations touch on wartime displacement, large-scale delphinium farming, and how gardening informed experiments in art and plant breeding.
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How Maeterlinck And Rodin Framed The Garden As Art
- Maurice Maeterlinck and Auguste Rodin gave Steichen permission to treat the garden as an intellectual and creative space.
- Maeterlinck hybridized plants and Rodin shaped large-scale landscapes, inspiring Steichen's artistic and gardening synthesis.
Voulanger Studio Sparked Art And Gardening
- In 1908 Steichen and his wife rented a house in Voulanger with a walled three-acre garden and he immediately began gardening and painting there.
- He built a prefabricated studio in the garden and created the mural suite In Exaltation of Flowers for friends in New York.
War, Aerial Photography, And Returning To Saved Delphiniums
- Steichen fled France in 1914 with his family and later joined the American Expeditionary Forces Aerial Photographic Unit in 1917.
- After the war he returned to Voulanger and found neighbors had tried to preserve his delphiniums, prompting his later deeper engagement with gardening.
