Cobble Hill - Gardener's Calendar 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

Twelve months of gardening in twelve Art Nouveau panels, and the whole year ends up on the table at once. This is Eugene Grasset's La Belle Jardiniere, a calendar he designed in 1896, reproduced as a grid.

What you are looking at

Twelve panels, four across and three down, each headed with its month in French: Janvier, Fevrier, Mars, Avril on the top row, Mai, Juin, Juillet, Aout on the second, Septembre, Octobre, Novembre, Decembre on the third. Each shows a woman working in a garden in that month's weather and light, dressed for it, doing the job the month actually calls for: pruning in January, sowing under glass in February, planting out in April, cutting flowers in September, clearing in November. Under each panel is a footer band repeating the month in English, Spanish, German, Dutch and Italian. Between the panels run narrow ornamental strips of stylised plants.

Grasset was Swiss born, worked in Paris, and was one of the handful of designers who turned Art Nouveau from a fashion into a style. The flat colour, the heavy contour line and the plant forms used as architecture are all his.

What it is like to build

This is twelve small puzzles wearing a trench coat, and you should build it that way. Do the lattice first: the ornamental strips between the columns are narrow vertical bands, and the rules between the rows are hard dark horizontals. Once the grid is in you have twelve holes of roughly seventy pieces, each with its own palette, and you can take them in any order.

Sorting by panel is easy because Grasset gave every month a different colour. January is bare brown and slate, April is apple blossom and pale green, May is iris blue and daffodil, August is sunflower gold, October is ochre and rust, December is holly green and deep red. Pull the piles apart on that basis before you build anything.

The ornamental strips are the trap. They repeat, there are eight of them, and a strip piece that looks certain can belong in three places. Do those by position and shape rather than by pattern, and do them early while the grid still tells you which slot is empty.

Why the Cobble Hill cut suits a grid

Cobble Hill are Canadian and cut a random cut, so the pieces are not in rows and columns and no two are alike. On an image that is itself a strict grid that is a useful tension: the picture is regular and the cut is not, so shape stays informative right through the repeating border strips. Linen textured board, and the poster is included.

Specifications

A little context

Fine art is a pillar of what we stock rather than a shelf we keep for form's sake, and a multi-panel decorative work like this one is a genuinely different build from a single painting. A painting asks you to read brushwork. A grid asks you to organise. If it is the organising you enjoy, the other grid-format title in stock is Squirrels At Home, which is nine panels instead of twelve. The rest of the shelf is at Art.

Stock is real and it is in Sydney. Free shipping Australia wide over $150, and free same-day delivery inside 6 km of North Bondi with no minimum.

Built it already? Use the Questions section below and tell us how you found it. Which part fought you, how long it took, and whether you would send someone else to it. We answer every one.