In old age, Monet said he took more pride in his garden than his art, and perhaps that is why the three-part panorama of water lilies reunited for the first time in decades at the climax of this show is so overwhelming – so magnificent. The bank has gone. All you see is water, flower, foliage, reflection, light, on and on, round and round. There is no up or down, no end to the beauty of these constellations of colour in liquid space and air. Monet’s garden is beautiful beyond measure: his field of vision is limitless.

Because all this took place at the very beginning of the modern era, you get to see photographs of the artists in question: there’s Wassily Kandinsky in shorts and shirtsleeves digging in the dirt; Edouard Vuillard is folded awkwardly into a cane chair. These glimpses of character are surprisingly enlightening. There’s even a film snippet of Monet glancing across at his pond then frantically jabbing his brush at a canvas, a cigarette dangling extravagantly from his mouth.

For these artists and others, the garden gave them the freedom to break new ground and explore the ever-changing world around them. Highlights include a remarkable selection of works by Monet, including the monumental Agapanthus Triptych, reunited specifically for the exhibition, Renoir’s Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil and Kandinsky’s Murnau The Garden II. For a show that was always going to be a surefire hit, ‘Painting the Modern Garden’ more than delivers in the ways you’d expect. Floral masterpieces by Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse are abundant; there are also endless discoveries to be made, from Henri Le Sidaner’s ‘The Rose Pavilion’ (1936), pink and powdery like your nan’s cheek, to the fiery sunset strangeness of little-known Spaniard Santiago Rusiñol’s ‘Glorieta VII, Aranjuez’ (1919). The Royal Academy has embraced the theme with gusto. Walls are painted the sludgy greens and subdued blues of posh garden sheds. There are park benches to sit on. You half expect a holographic Titchmarsh to appear, offering advice about your hanging baskets. Trace the emergence of the modern garden in its many forms and glories as we take you through a period of great social change and innovation in the arts. Discover the paintings of some of the most important Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Avant-Garde artists of the early twentieth century as they explore this theme. But there is a tension to this show. The curators want to woo the gardener from first to last: so there are 19th-century seed catalogues, horticultural specimens, cucumber frames and hothouse cupolas; real plants even bloom under cover. You may consult the detailed letters Monet wrote to one of his (six) gardeners for tips, and sit on teak garden furniture to watch a film of the master painting among the ponds at Giverny. Many of these men (only two women are represented) take little interest in the form and character of individual plants This exhibition digs deeper into his garden. When Monet finally achieved success after the struggles of his early career, he spent the money on a natural wonderland to ravish his eyes. The garden at Giverny became his second artistic project; gradually it fused with his paintings, providing endless inspiration, subject matter and reverie.

RA reserves the right at any time to cancel, modify, reschedule or supersede the event or any aspect of the event Monet died in 1926. The 20th century had even worse horrors to come than the slaughter that made his willows weep and it’s in that shadow that his painted gardens matter. They are glowing islands of civilisation and hope in a modern world guilty of so much barbarity and violence. Monet is not just one of the world’s greatest artists, he is one of the most moral. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Symbolists, Fauves, and German Expressionists embraced more subjective approaches by imagining gardens as visionary utopias; many turned to painting gardens to explore abstract colour theory and decorative design. In the early twentieth century, Monet emerges as a vanguard artist. The monumental canvases of his garden at Giverny anticipate major artistic movements that were to come such as American Abstract Expressionism.

Exhibition tours

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