Andrew Raftery, January: Reading Seed Catalogs, 2009–16, engravings transfer printed on glazed white earthenware, diameter: 12 1/2 in. (31.8 cm). The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from Richard Benefield and John F. Kunowski. © Andrew Raftery.  The Huntington is located in San Marino, CA

When the COVID-19 health crisis that has upended all our lives is over and The Huntington is again fully open to the public, one life-affirming pleasure awaiting visitors will be found in The Huntington Art Gallery’s Works on Paper Room. There, displayed against walls of saturated blue, is a resonant, even elegiac, visual narrative. The story that it tells of life and renewal is not on paper, but on 12 uniquely bordered, luminous, ceramic plates revealing in keenly observed detail “The Autobiography of a Garden,” a month-to-month evolution of a real-life garden in Providence, Rhode Island.

The exhibition, on view through July 5, 2021,  is the work of American painter and printmaker Andrew Raftery and is the product of his inventive, modern-day approach to the transfer of print images onto ceramic, a process dating back to the mid-18th century.

Raftery, a professor of printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, specializes in engraved scenes of contemporary American suburbia. His portfolios, Suit Shopping (2002) and Open House (2008), were collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the British Museum. He is a 2008 fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as a member of the National Academy of Design.

Andrew Raftery, February: Planting Seeds, 2009–16, engravings transfer printed on glazed white earthenware, diameter: 12 1/2 in. (31.8 cm). The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from Richard Benefield and John F. Kunowski. © Andrew Raftery.

Eight years in the making, “The Autobiography of a Garden” marks the realization of Raftery’s long-held desire to transfer his engravings to a potentially functional ceramic object, rather than paper. His visual story at The Huntington, told in fine-lined detail and concurrent with the garden he designed and planted at his mother’s home, begins in January, on a plate entitled “Reading Seed Catalogs.” It depicts Raftery himself, perusing a seed catalog while lying in bed. The walls of his room are hung with framed prints by old masters; jeans and a pair of long johns are thrown over an armchair. Other seed catalogs lie discarded on a rumpled throw rug beside the bed.

In February, Raftery has portrayed himself in robe and slippers, sitting at his kitchen table, planting seeds in a container. A display of ceramic transfer ware plates, representative of Raftery’s own large collection of antique dishes—some nearly 200 years old—covers the walls; more of these antiques sit in the kitchen sink.

Transfer ware, once wildly popular, fell out of fashion some time ago. Raftery sought to reclaim it, working through a painstaking process involving ceramics, engraving, printing, and several experts in each area, to bring his work to life. "The plates in our collection are very much a part of our lives whether they’re on the walls or on the table,” maintains Raftery. He feels a kinship, he says, to the workers and designers who made them and views them as a microcosm “of the way people lived, how they imagined the world, their desire for decoration in their lives.”

Andrew Raftery, March: Watering the Cold Frame, 2009–16, engravings transfer printed on glazed white earthenware, diameter: 12 1/2 in. (31.8 cm). The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from Richard Benefield and John F. Kunowski. © Andrew Raftery.

The year in the garden progresses from plate to plate. Scenes change according to the months they represent: bushes and flowers grow and blossom; plants are trimmed, weeded, and watered, and die away; bulbs are gathered, and, finally, in December, there are a barren winter landscape and Raftery’s footsteps in the snow. (Drawing and painting a garden as it grew presented a unique challenge: “If one year I didn’t get to draw the tulips in April,” Raftery states, “I had to wait until the next April to do it.”)

Stamped on the back of each plate, a cartouche with ornamentation related to the design on the front displays such plainly descriptive titles as “Cultivating the Lettuce,” “Watering the Cold Frame,” “Bringing in the Chrysanthemums.” The unique edges of the plates, too, have meaning. The clockwise, saw-toothed edge for March, for instance, represents time “springing forward.”

The “understory” of the plates, Raftery explains, encompasses the time that he spent with his mother (who just turned 90) during the project, “and how special the garden was as an experience at her house and how it relates to her work as an artist.” Raftery’s mother, a painter, employs the flowers in her garden as subjects in her expressionist works. “And it definitely has to do with the passage of time; it definitely deals with mortality,” Raftery adds. “But then it has the positive side that makes gardening so wonderful: there’s always next season.”

Andrew Raftery, April: Edging the Beds, 2009–16, engravings transfer printed on glazed white earthenware, diameter: 12 1/2 in. (31.8 cm). The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from Richard Benefield and John F. Kunowski. © Andrew Raftery.