Nature as muse
New book beautifully shows how flowers have inspired artists for centuries
Now that daffodils, hyacinths and snowdrops are blooming, learning about the cultural history, language and symbolism of flowers is an especially timely and worthwhile pursuit. For 4,000 years, flowers have inspired artists to draw, sketch, paint, sculpt and make photographs or objects out of papier-mache.
A panel of 23 art history experts from all over the world collaborated with Phaidon, the publishing house, to create this visual feast titled, “Flower: Exploring the World in Bloom.” It’s part of Phaidon’s Explorer series.
One of the experts who contributed 11 concise entries is Lugene Bruno, curator of art and senior research scholar for the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon University.
She chose the artists to write about: Georg Ehret, Nicolas Robert, Leopold Blaschka, Maria Sibylla Merian, Pierre-Joseph Redoute, Frances Giles, Augusta Withers, Lizzie Sanders, Rachel Pedder-Smith, Susan Ogilvy and Margaret Mee.
Geared to a general audience, each entry below a large image is about 250 words. Ms. Bruno said that forced her to make every word count.
“We wrote about the artist, why the plant was important at that time and described what was important for the reader to look at,” she said.
Published in 2020 and priced at $59.95, the book is a
breathtaking work of art packed with stellar scholarship and outstanding color reproduction. It is a followup to a 2016 book by Phaidon titled “Plant: Exploring the Botanical World.”
In the opening essay of “Flower: Exploring the World in Bloom,” Anna Pavord, a well-known British gardening columnist, observes that flowers usually play a key role at birthday celebrations, weddings and funerals.
Theauthor of more than 10 gardening books, Ms. Pavord notes that artists use flowers in every conceivable media: carved wood, furniture, logos, manuscripts, metalwork, jewelry, porcelain plates, posters, tapestries and woodblock prints. Even ephemera such as cigarette cards, postage stamps and seedpackets are included.
Instead of arranging the images by chronology or theme, pictures are paired side by side to show startling similarities or contrasts.
One page, for example, shows Gustav Klimt’s 1907 painting “Flower Garden,” a dense tableaux of red poppies, white daisies and orange zinnias.
On the opposite page is “Garden, 2000” by Marc Quinn, a contemporary British artist who arranged colorful flowers, including anthuriums and red hot pokers, in a massive glass tank. The plants look fresh from the garden but are actually frozen solid.
An eight-page timeline runs from 3,000 B.C. to 2008. Anchored by a single image at the top, each column covers major developments in floral history. The calla lily, an import from South Africa, was recorded growing in the royal garden in Paris in 1664. More than a
century later, in 1784, the first seed business in North America was founded in Philadelphia.
In concise, one-paragraph entries, Shane Connolly, founder of Shane Connolly & Company Flowers in London, explains the meanings of flowers from amaryllis to tulip. His company has a royal warrant from Charles, the Prince of Wales.
There’s also a glossary of horticultural terms, a list of recommended books for further reading and short biographies of the artists whose work appears on these
luscious pages.
The actual images range from still life paintings by Dutch masters to a dazzling photograph of a pop-up floral display created early in the morning by a team from Lewis Miller Design in New York City. Who knew that a trash can across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art could serve as an oversized flower pot for leftover blooms that would otherwise go to waste?
Among the most memorable images is a color engraving by Redoute, who worked for Marie “Let them eat
cake” landing in botanical Antoinette one history.
French empress Josephine Bonaparte of the best before jobs brought Malmaison, Paris, him to called her which home Chateau outside she bought painted in the 1799. exotic First, gardens Redoute on the estate. His rendering of a native South African amaryllis called “Amaryllis josephina” captivated the empress and she gave him the title of “Painter of Flowers.”