Flower: Paintings by 40 Great Artists - Hardcover

Fisher, Celia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0711233616 ISBN 13: 9780711233614

Publisher: Frances Lincoln, 2012

Synopsis

This is a book about flowers and about painters. The author has chosen forty of her favourite flower paintings and as she is both expert gardener and art historian, she has all manner of fascinating things to say about the flowers, the artists and the contexts of the paintings.

Manet's mysterious Still Life with Rose and Brioche records the arrival of the new hybrid tea rose in all its perfection. Vanessa Bell's Red Hot Pokers and Artichoke came in the wake of Roger Fry's Post-Impressionist exhibitions in London and at a time when Bell had found refuge and creative energy with Duncan Grant at Charleston.

The paintings are not always the most obvious - Van Gogh is here represented by a ravishing branch of almond blossom. But Monet has his waterlilies and Rennie Mackintosh his delicate fritillaries and there is a feast of glorious Dutch bouquets.

There is old and new, known and unknown in this wonderful collection. Each painting has been chosen both to delight the eye and to offer a source of lively stories and intriguing facts.

About this title

About the Author

Celia Fisher is both an art historian and a plantswoman. At the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, she researched the uses of plants worldwide before going on to study at the Courtauld Institute. There she specialised in the history of plants in art. She now lectures and identifies flowers in artworks for galleries and art historians. Her articles have appeared in art and gardening journals, including Apollo, Country Life and Hortus and she has written Flowers in the National Gallery for London's National Gallery and Medieval Flowers for the British Library. Her main relaxation is gardening and her town garden has been open under the National Gardens Scheme. She lives in Kew, Surrey.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

This book is about different ways of looking at flowers - artistically rather than scientifically, but not simply as decoration. The chosen examples represent the art movements of their time, together with something more extreme and passionate coming from the individual artists. Georgia O'Keeffe wrote: 'Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small - we haven't time - and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time. So I said to myself I'll paint what I see, what the flower is to me, but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it.'



O'Keeffe was fascinated by arums (like Diego Rivera who repeatedly painted waxy-white calla lilies). She painted a series of six entitled Jack-in-the-pulpit, each growing increasingly abstract as she zoomed into the centre of the flower. Such dramatic close-ups were also well suited to another sexy flower, the orchid, which is adapted more flamboyantly than most species to waylay pollinating insects, for which purpose it sports protuberances and patterns that also intrigue humans. O'Keeffe chose Brassavola hybrids, and Gary Hume painted slipper orchids, but the trend had begun earlier with the travels of Marianne North, a Victorian lady painter, who set her dramatically enlarged comet orchids among tropical vegetation and butterflies; and with Martin Johnson Heade who journeyed to Central America for inspiration and painted cattleyas looming from jungle landscapes amid humming birds.



They also painted roses; almost everyone from Botticelli to Cy Twombly has painted roses. This book could easily have been of roses alone and through them the history of both art and horticulture could have been traced. For two centuries before flowers actually became the subject of artworks white roses appeared in religious contexts alongside the Virgin Mary to represent her purity and spirituality, while red roses symbolised the redeeming blood of Christ. These were the two traditional roses of Europe, semi-double with their golden stamens glowing in the centre of the flower. Then, early in the seventeenth century, the Spanish artist Zurbaran painted a mystic still life of vessels associated with the Mass, with one damask rose, a species which is white but blushes pink as it opens. This rose may symbolise the Virgin conceiving Christ, or the water in the cup about to be miraculously turned to wine. For rose historians it is above all the portrait of a rose new to European art.



Zurbaran's still life was unusual in featuring one flower, artists of the seventeenth century generally favoured quantity as well as quality and, among the latest novelties to appear in flower paintings, roses earned a central position. Mignon included the many-petalled centifolia rose (the pride of rose breeders), the even newer bicoloured rose and a single yellow rose, while van Huysum's rarest flower was a double yellow rose. Some symbolism remained, among these exquisite petals insects rummaged as a reminder of mortality (the same preoccupation that the contemporary artist Mark Quinn seeks to express with his silicon flowers frozen in a false, perpetual bloom). The diversity of rose symbolism grows with every century and becomes more enigmatic - Manet's rose in a brioche, Klee's rose garden and Dali's surreal red rose suspended in a blue sky.



The idea of painting flowers against the sky first arrived in Europe from Japan with woodcut prints, just in time to inspire the Impressionists in the use of different viewpoints and bold blocks of colour. Otherwise Renoir might never have stared diagonally downwards on a bed of dahlias, nor Caillebotte crouched among his chrysanthemums, nor Monet gazed across the watery expanses of his lily ponds allowing the sky to appear only in reflection. But the sky itself was Van Gogh's, whether he was painting starry constellations, dark crow

Edition details

• Publisher: Frances Lincoln
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0711233616
• ISBN 13: 9780711233614
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 96