I believe this yearning began last year at the Tate gallery in London. There I saw iridescent Bonnard pictures of his family sitting in gardens and balconies with cups of coffee in their hands and dogs curled up snoozing blissfully in the grass at their feet. There were, of course, the more famous paintings of Marthe, his lifelong love and muse, soaking in the bathtub. He painted Marthe for thirty years and she never aged a day in his eyes. Bonnard seemed like a happier version of Gulley Jimson, hero and artist and scamp in The Horse’s Mouth, Joyce Cary’s raffish masterpiece. Bonnard seems to have had a much more felicitous domestic life and more gardens. My visit to the Tate was the last straw. I began to plant a French Impressionist garden with lots of lavender and roses and daisies though, for practical reasons, no water lilies.

The garden was perfect this year. Rainfall was abundant and timed for maximum bloom. Perennials matured, annuals flourished. And yet there was something missing.

Garden furniture.

I prowled my neighborhood, furtively inspecting other people’s patios.

There were wrought iron, curlycued table legs and wicker chairs and neighbors drinking coffee and reading under floral or white umbrellas. Bonnard would have loved it. His friend Matisse would have loved it, too, though I might be somewhat too far from the ocean for Matisse’s taste.

There were barbecue grills on some patios but the main activity seemed to be reading and drinking coffee. One couple had a pure white greyhound snoozing on the grass at their feet. Took my breath away.

Finally, I knew what I needed. I visited a store which specializes in patio, pool, and lawn furniture, acres of it. There were teak and cedar and wrought iron tables and chairs and gigantic umbrellas, designed, I was told, to look like French market umbrellas. I was hopelessly entranced, led on by my vision of mornings in the garden. I was not at all fooled though somewhat amazed by the fake steaks, artificial salads, and glasses of plastic champagne on the hundreds of tables in the store, tables packed in only inches apart but each implying a whole garden or a poolside vignette. I was looking for the suite that implied my garden. I found it in a set of white chairs and a watery glass table, above which a white market-style umbrella hovers and on which I place, at lunchtime, blue plates. My garden is now complete.

One never knows what experiences will lead to flowers. Or furniture. Visit a museum and your life can change in unexpected ways. The Bonnard show I saw at the Tate is no longer there, but I have the elaborate catalogue. The text is a little dense and I haven’t read much of it. But the pictures are glorious and I look at them often while sitting out under my white umbrella, sipping coffee, on my veranda, surrounded by lavender and roses and the blue shadows under the daisies. You don’t have to fly to London for a new outlook on your surroundings. Wherever you live there’s a museum nearby. There are world-class art collections in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Providence. I’ve been to museums in all those cities and the Louvre, too. There are a lot more museums I plan to visit whenever I can, in large and small cities all over the world.

In the middle of January, when the garden is buried under snow and ice and the patio furniture is stowed away in the garage, I will still be able to enjoy the patio furniture of the imagination all year long in the galleries and catalogs, postcards and prints, and in the memories the world’s great painters, famous or less so, have shared with us all.