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In
nature, the seed of a flower lies dormant, cold, unlovely
and unloved. But even in this most lowly state it contains,
in incredibly complex codes, all of the information it will
need for an entire life. All the beauty, the fragrance, the
strength and the promise of passion are already programmed.
The seed waits only for light and warmth and a season of its
own.
In human
history, every season has found some place for the flower as
imagery. For centuries, in virtually every culture East and
West, we find flowers: woven into fabric, carved into
architecture, painted along borders of text and glazed onto
porcelain. In another realm, flowers have been drawn with
great care, by those devoted to science and healing, into
the pages of “herbals” and medical studies.
The grand
flower painting as we know it in Western art history began
much like the tiny seed that finds refuge in a rock crevice,
a seed that takes root and holds on until it gains strength
to bloom. We can follow the flower in Western painting
almost creeping in from the ground up. From primitive
societies to the great Greeks, there are countless
depictions of flowers in art before the Renaissance, but the
paintings of this enlightened age seem a likely place to
search for the roots of the independent flower painting. The
changing symbolic journey of the flower, too, began earlier
and continues even in our own time, but it is especially
fascinating during this same period of rebirth in Western
art.
Beneath
kneeling shepherds in many of the Adoration paintings are
found tiny flowers; perhaps these tentative blossoms were
painted as design elements, more likely for pleasure and
charm than actual iconography. But in many of the
Annunciation paintings, as the angel Gabriel kneels before
Mary announcing her chosen above all others, there is
deliberatly a pot of lilies nearby. Robert Campin’s
Merodé Altar piece (1425) in the Cloisters of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a beautiful
example. Sometimes, as in Leonardo da Vinci’s
Annunciation in the Uffizi,
Florence,
a branch of lilies is held by the angel. The lilies painted
in such contexts as these are put there purposefully to
symbolize the Virgin’s purity; hence, her worthiness to bear
the Christ child. The flowers in such paintings are almost
always included as generally-understood symbols or
attributes of the saint depicted in the painting. The Virgin
Mary claims the greatest variety of floral attributes. A
fourteenth-century hymn compared twelve different kinds of
plants to the Virgin. The white lily is the most prominent,
of course, but the blue iris and the white iris are
included. When the violet was used, it symbolized Mary’s
humility. The rose is prominent as well. Popular literature
of the time claimed that before the rose became a flower of
the earth, it grew in Paradise without thorns; the thorns
came after
Eden to remind man of his sins and fall from grace, the
fragrance and beauty remaining to remind him of the splendor
he has lost. It is in reference to this legend that Mary is
called a “rose without thorns,” as she was free from
original sin.
Many of
the flowers used in Christian and early Renaissance painting
(and beyond) borrowed their symbolism from pagan mythology.
The hyacinth, Christian symbol of prudence, peace of mind,
and the desire for heaven, came from the legend of Apollo’s
accidental killing of Hyacinthus. The narcissus (of the
famous self-love legend) is sometimes painted in scenes of
the Annunciation or of Paradise to show the triumph of
divine love and eternal life over death, selfishness and
sin.1 Mythological subjects, although often still painted
with Christian overtones, continued to be painted in the
high Renaissance as well. Commissioned by Lorenzo di
Pierfrancesco de Medici, Sandro Bottecelli created two of
the most famous and beloved Renaissance masterpieces:
Primavera (1478) and The Birth of Venus (1490).
In both paintings, flowers are prominent. In Primavera,
Zephyrus, the wind god, enters from the right in pursuit of
the nymph Chloris, from whose mouth issues flowers. She is
transformed into Flora, goddess of Spring, who strews
flowers from her flower-embroidered gown upon the earth; the
female in the center is Venus, goddess of beauty and love.
In The Birth of Venus, the goddess, standing on a
cockle shell, rises from the sea and is blown to shore by
the wind gods. Bottecelli painted flowers blowing with the
wind and a flowered gown for the newborn goddess held by
Hour, who awaits her arrival.
It is
acknowledged that the flower takes a significant step toward
independence in the central panel of the Portinari Altar
Piece by Hugo van der Goes (1467-1482). In his
foreground of the Adoration of the Shepherds, he
painted two vases of flowers. One contains white lilies and
blue irises, both symbolizing the Virgin. The other is a
glass vase of columbine, the form of which has been likened
to a white dove; for this reason, columbine has been used to
symbolize the Holy Ghost. But the first time a vase of
flowers broke out of the religious picture to stand
completely on its own is disputed. Wolfgang Born (in his
1947 book, Still-Life Painting in America), cites a
painting by Hans Memling, who lived in the late fifteenth
century, as the earliest.2 The painting (done on the back of
a portrait) presents a bunch of wild flowers in a majolica
pitcher on a table covered with an oriental rug of geometric
design. Lilies and irises are the subjects of a pair of
tall, narrow wood panel paintings that other scholars cite
as the first authentic still-life of flowers.3 These may
have been cabinet doors and they were painted, probably as a
commission, by the German artist Ludger tom Ring the Younger
in 1562. Whichever was first, the flower was at last free to
become a legitimate subject all on its own.
Once
freed from religious and allegorical genre paintings, the
independent flower painting exploded with the beauty and
passion we have come to expect from the subject, finding its
greatest champions in Flanders and Holland. While artists
there admired flowers for their aesthetic value, the
development of realistic flower painting, as well as
still-life painting in general, was also encouraged by
religious and economic changes. The
Low Countries
gained independence from their Spanish Catholic rulers.
Calvinism, the new religion in power discouraged devotional
imagery, forcing artists to turn to secular subjects and to
secular patrons, who were now present in the
newly-prosperous merchant class. The sea-going traders of
Holland
had established commerce throughout the world. Business was
booming and the cities, corporations, and the bourgeois
class had great freedom in matters of trade. There was born
a new prosperity and a heightened sense of nationalism.
Two of
the earliest and most influential painters of flowers were
Flemish: Jan Brueghel and Ambrosius Bosschaert. Brueghel,
born in 1568, specialized in flowers and shells and
collaborated with Rubens in supplying still-life settings
for figure compositions. (Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter
Paul Rubens created The Sense of Smell, Madrid, Museo
del Prado). Bosschaert transferred to
Holland
before 1593, trained his three sons and other pupils,
notably Balthasar van Der Ast. With these Flemish artists
and their influence on the Dutch, the golden age of flower
painting was born. Full bloom came with Jan Davidsz de Hemm
and Abraham van Beyeren and blossomed on into the eighteenth
century with Rachel Ruysch and Jan van Huijsum.
The
responses by artists to the changes in their society gave us
some of our most beautiful and powerful flower paintings.
Breaking from the overt and usually saintly symbolism of
earlier Christian works, symbolism became a reinforcement
relating to human conduct and lessons about moral behavior.
Individual flowers were still allowed some of their former
meaning, but those meanings were brought home literally from
the interior of the church and palace to the dining rooms of
the merchants. The lily, once belonging to Mary, now
preached purity to all. The violet, formerly the humility of
The Virgin, encouraged humility in every man. Then there was
the moral lesson of the fleeting quality of a blossom’s
magic, with the passing of such beauty understood as a
metaphor for the briefness of human life on earth.4 Symbolic
pictures and explanatory texts in contemporary emblem books
of the time were known and adopted by artists. Almost every
object was assigned some moral significance.
“Disguised symbolism,” a result of the new Calvinist order,
was not the only influence on choice of subject. While
presenting religious and moral commentary in this manner was
socially comfortable, there were other, more practical
factors to consider. Many of the flowers so faithfully
presented were rare and valuable. Traders who imported
tulips from the
Near East,
for example, made enormous profits. One lady who was unable
to afford a certain kind of tulip commissioned a painting of
it from Jan Brueghel the Elder. It is reported that some
bulbs were sold for their weight in gold. Representations of
rare, unblemished flowers reflected the wealth and
prosperity of the patron. The tulip, in fact, first
presented purely for the love of its beauty and its
extravagant value, most likely attained some additional
status as a moral symbol for the hazards of greed with the
crash in tulip speculation. Roemer Visscher’s book
Sinnepoppen shows an engraving, Striped Tulips,
1614, bearing the inscription, “A fool and his money are
soon parted.” The science of botany, incidentally, another
important influence on the flower subject as art, was
gaining in popularity, so many artists presented their
flowers with careful, almost scientific attention to detail.
The city of Leiden had one of the finest botanical gardens
in the seventeenth century, and new, rare plant specimens
were brought there from around the world for all to see.
Significant stylistic differences developed between such
flower painters of the early seventeenth century as Jan
Brueghel and Bosschaert and those of the end of that
century, notably Jan van Huysum and Rachel Ruysch. In the
earlier paintings, the compositions were almost mechanical,
and equal allegiance was paid to each flower. As the century
progressed, the compositions became as important as the
individual flower. While no detail was lost, the later
artists (Jan Van Huijsum in particular) presented their
flowers in flowing, extravagant compositions that even today
delight the senses.
With the
death of Van Huijsum in 1749, the flower piece became much
less popular and, finally—although Van Huijsum had many
imitators—the golden age of Dutch flower painting came to an
end. Some attribute the ultimate cause of flower paintings
demise in
Holland to another period of political and economic change that
brought about a very different treatment of the flower in
art. Arthur Edwin Bye in his book Pots and Pans,
Studies in Still-Life Painting, presents this
explanation:
After the death of William III of
Orange,
the political prestige of Holland waned, while at the same
time, under Louis XIV the prestige of France rose to its
height. This political ascendancy of France, carrying with
it a national prosperity, was naturally coincident with
French influence. To Paris, instead of to Amsterdam, the
eyes of the art world looked, and for two hundred years the
western world fell under the influence of French Classicism.
Dutch art, it is true, entered France, with Watteau, the Van
Loos and others. The Flemish Rubens did much to mold French
taste, and Chardin, an isolated figure, was quite Dutch in
spirit; yet, we must say that Dutch art was sleeping in the
eighteenth century.5
French
classicism had long and far-reaching effects. Classical and
academic canons were strictly followed, and the flower
became only decorative again. There are beautiful examples
of flowers in art during this time, but the flower on canvas
had only a minor role. There is, however, one flower painter
of that period who must be mentioned. Pierre-Joseph Redouté
(in 1786) was appointed draughtsman to Queen
Marie-Antoinette’s Cabinet and later employed by Empress
Josephine as head of a team of botanical artists working at
Malmaison. While Redouté is best known for his botanical
renderings, he did do some paintings of flowers in a
still-life setting, and his style influenced artists to
follow. Later, in flower painting of nineteenth-century
France, there were diverse styles flourishing side by side.
There was even a very popular Neo-Dutch tradition that
emerged. Many of these paintings are striking and
beautifully executed, but no singular voice rose above the
others until the middle of the century with Henri
Fantin-Latour.
Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) is, today, one of the most admired
flower painters of all time. He gained his initial
reputation with his Salon picture, Atelier aux
Batignolles, a group portrait of some of the
Impressionist giants. But it is the flower that has kept his
art alive. Rejected when he sought admission to the Ecole
des Beaux Arts, he chose the Louvre as his next teacher and
began to make copies of the masters he most admired:
Delacroix, Rembrandt, Halls, Chardin and Watteau. It was
during these years of study that he met Edouard Manet and
the young James McNeill Whistler. Whistler became a close
friend and invited Fantin to England, complete with an offer
of introduction to Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Edwards. The Edwards
became the artist’s unofficial agents and found buyers for
many of his flower still-lifes—Fantin-Latour and the English
with their profound love of flowers seem a natural match.
The
Victoria and
Albert
Museum in
London
has a surprising number of small but excellent Fantin-Latour
floral works. The Metropolitan Museum in New York has
Still Life with Pansies (1874) on display, a painting
that demonstrates Fantin’s rare feeling for texture. One can
almost feel the velvet of the petals and, while there is
greater looseness and a broader handling of brush and paint
than the Dutch examples, the heritage of light and attention
to the individual flower in the Dutch flower piece is still
there. Flowers to this artist were truly flowers, not
religious or economic or moral statements but real flowers
that invite touch and smell and contemplation. Although he
was a friend to many of the Impressionists, even painting
some of their portraits, Fantin developed his own, very
personal style, preferring the controlled light of the
studio to the outdoor light effects so popular with others.
Many of
Fantin-Latour’s Impressionist contemporaries, however, did
find flowers to be a worthy vehicle to express light and
form; the flower as vehicle rather than the flower as flower
drew them. Artists were probably aware of the symbolic past
of the flower, but symbolism did not play a prominent role.
Some of the most famous flower paintings ever created came
from this period: the peonies of Manet, the countless
blossoms of Monet expressing that artist’s life-long love of
flowers, and, most famous of all, Van Gogh’s sunflowers and
irises of recent auction fame.
In
America, flowers entered the world of art in a perfectly
natural way as artists accompanied exploratory expeditions
to the new world and recorded their findings. The flower was
painted for botanical correctness and often in its natural
setting. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that
American artists became interested in treating the flower as
an independent subject free from landscape and botanical
interest.
A German
immigrant, Severin Roesen, was among the first artists in
America to treat the flower as a grand still-life subject.
Roesen, George Henry Hall and William Jacob Hays all had
their roots firmly in the Dutch tradition. These artists,
working from the mid through the late nineteenth century,
shared with the Dutch artists of the past their interest in
gathering the showiest of garden flowers, but they did not
seem to share a need for symbolism and moral content. Then,
from 1859 throughout the sixties, an important American
artist produced flower paintings that echoed none of the
Dutch influence. John Lafarge’s flowers were painted from
direct observation and sought to express the spirit of
flowers rather than their botanical form. Of his early
flower studies, he said, “There were certain in which I
tried to give something more that a study or a handsome
arrangement. Some few were paintings of the water-lily,
which had always appealed to the sense of something of a
meaning—a mysterious appeal such as comes to us from certain
arrangements of notes of music.”6 Lafarge’s originality, the
growing knowledge of the work of Fantin-Latour, as well as a
new awareness and understanding of the qualities found in
the Oriental art of flower painting all had a revolutionary
effect upon flower painting in America.
Wilton
Lockwood, Howard Gardner Cushing and Maria Oakey Dewing
helped bring flower painting into the American twentieth
century. J. Alden Weir must also be mentioned, as he was
interested in texture and shape without meticulous attention
to detail. While William Merritt Chase’s more famous
still-life paintings were of fish, when he chose to paint
flowers, he, too, was concerned with surface and the
vitality of the form. The symbolic nature of the flower
deferred to the beauty and excitement of the painted
surface.
As we
have seen, the treatment of the flower in art has drifted
with the changing cultural seasons. Religion, economics,
government and social custom have all had their effect both
on the physical presence of the painted flower and the
symbolism surrounding it. Throughout the past, attitudes
about certain flowers and their place in the hierarchy of
art were most often dictated from sources outside the
individual. But in sharp contrast, the place of the flower
in art today speaks volumes about the way our own current
society thinks and looks at the world. There is no simple
prevailing attitude and no single set of rules. With the
possible exception of the greeting card and flower merchant,
no one tells us what to think about a specific flower.
Georgia O’Keeffe once wrote: “When you took time to really
notice my flower you hung all your own associations with
flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I
think and see what you think and see of the flower and I
don’t.”7 So true. Each one of us owns pieces of knowledge
collected from school, the media, the people in our lives
and our own private thoughts and dreams. Today, more than
any other time in history is the era of the individual, so
it is the individual who brings a personal symbolism to each
flower.
Of
course, knowledge of the symbolism of the past is not dead.
We often incorporate that knowledge into modern experience,
but, consciously or unconsciously, we also add our personal
symbolism. The rose, with possibly the longest symbolic past
of any flower, is a good example. To the Romans, the rose
was the symbol of victory, pride, beauty and triumphant
love: Venus’s own flower. We continue, today, to attribute
victory and love to the rose; at the race track, it is the
run for the roses, and lovers still send more roses than any
other flower. But individuals, because of personal
experiences and perceptions, bring their own meanings, too.
The rose has become the saddest of all flowers to one woman
because, to her, it is the flower of apology, of love lost.
The violet may still signal humility to some, but to another
it will forever be the wedding flower. The grand peony,
symbol of abundance in its native China became shame and
bashfulness to the Victorians, but to a certain executive
the peony is warmth, comfort and unquestioning love, having,
in his childhood, been a constant presence at his
grandmother’s back door. Persephone, in her fear when
pursued by Hades, dropped the lilies she was picking, and
one legend says they turned into daffodils as they touched
the ground. This may have caused some in the past to regard
those flowers as unlucky, for they hang their heads when
brought inside. But to thousands of Americans the daffodil
conjures up days of innocence when we stood as school
children and recited Wordsworth’s, “I wandered lonely as a
cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills. When all at
once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils.”
It is
impossible to group the flower painters of today into a
single category. The choice to acknowledge or ignore
symbolism, whether personal or historic, lies with the
individual. So too is the choice of style. There are artists
today painting flowers in a hyper-realistic, almost
investigative manner. Others have chosen the freedom of
expression of a more alla prima brush. As diverse as is the
population, so diverse is the method of expression with the
flower and images in general. This makes personal perception
all the more important. The artist may plant the seed of
meaning in any given work, but the viewer will decide which
ideas will flourish and grow in their own minds. And with
the image of the flower, as with all other imagery, that is
as it should be.
1. George
Ferguson. Signs & Symbols in Christian Art,
Oxford
University Press,
New York,
1954
2.
Wolfgang Born. Still-Life Painting in
America,
Oxford
University Press,
New York,
1947
3.
Margaretta Salinger. The Flower Piece in European
Painting, Harper & Brothers Publishing, New York, 1949
4. Pierre
Skira. Still-life: A History, Rizzoli International
Publications Inc., New York, 1989
5. Arthur
Edwin Bye, Pots and Pans, Studies in Still-Life
Painting, Princeton University Press, 1921
6. Bye,
page 194
7. Ella
M. Foshay, Reflections of Nature, Flowers in
American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984
Weathervane Books,
New York. Page xiii
Joe Anna Arnett is a still-life painter who
specializes in flowers, both of her own choosing and those
commissioned by clients. She has exhibited at prestigious
galleries and exhibitions in New York City, London and many
others in the American Southwest, as well as ART ASIA in
Hong Kong.
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