GC Presents: The History of Flowers in Painting

1) Hans Memling — Vase of Flowers (1430) 

Leading Netherlandish painter Hans Memling had a style distinct from the Italian Renaissance — more focused on iconography, intricacy, and less three-dimensional. Here, a vase of flowers rests on a table with a printed tapestry. The background is dark, as are most of the flowers, besides a few highlighted ones. This piece is likely one of the first paintings of the Renaissance where the subject was flowers for the sake of their own representation, detached from religious iconography — in contrast to the Middle Ages, where each object had a religious representation.

2) Leonardo da Vinci —  Lily (1480)

Born in 1452 in Italy, Leonardo da Vinci– artist, engineer, architecture, science, botanist, scientist, and the quintessential “Renaissance Man”– illustrated the intersection of botany, science, and art in Lily. Using chalk and ink, the drawing highlights the Lily’s main features, the shape of the leaves, the stem, the shadows, and lighting. Though artistically, da Vinci might be most known for the Mona Lisa, his sketches of nature were an immense preoccupation and constituted a large part of his oeuvre.

3) Caravaggio — Still Life with Flowers and Fruit (1570) 

Caravaggio is an Italian painter attributed with establishing the Baroque, a period known for its dramatic lighting, tension, and chiaroscuro (which comes from the Italian: chiaro, “light,” and scuro, “dark”.) He frequently juxtaposed the sacred, which was still the central focus of painting at the time, with everyday scenarios, so that a religious scene appears as if in the present day. Still Life with Flowers and Fruit is dark, dimly lit, characteristic of his dramatic lighting– importantly, the flowers are scattered and seemingly without order.

4) Jan Brueghel the Elder — Bouquet (1603)

A dashing, bold explosion of colors, Jan Brueghel’s Bouquet is one of his most iconic works. One of the first painters from the Netherlands to focus on painting flowers, he became known for his still lifes– a rare concept for his time. The ceramic vase contains a huge bouquet of flowers with Irises, tulips, roses, narcissi and fritillary. The sheer explosion of bold colors makes this painting look contemporary — it would be difficult to guess it’s from 1603. In contrast to Leonardo and the Italian Renaissance preoccupation with painting from life, this still life is more about curating a particular image using natural elements, rather than directly observing nature itself.

5) Van Gogh — Sun Flowers (1888)

Van Gogh’s Sun Flowers is one of his most famous paintings, created as a series during the final years of his life. Though the artist spent years in formal training in the Netherlands, he was influenced by Japanese prints and the Impressionist movement. At the end of his career, he embraced personal expression, squeezing the paint directly onto the canvas, and in Sun Flowers, the paint is thick and blotted, adding a three-dimensional aspect. Van Gogh wasn’t going for a realistic representation, but rather aimed to capture the emotional feel of the sunflowers, which are both melancholic and lively.

6) Georgia O’Keeffe — Red Canna (1924)

American icon Georgia O’Keeffe is famous for her provocative paintings of flowers and natural forms. Her work borders on the abstract and the sensual, yet, as with Red Canna, they’re grounded in a depiction of nature. O’Keeffe was inspired by photographic elements of cropping, and magnifying, which the camera was able to capture. Her brush strokes are methodical, yet her palette of orange and red are bold and bright, integrating the technical with the abstract. In a period of art where depictions from nature had been polarized from abstract art, O’Keeffe played an important role in unifying the two, depicting the flowers as both personal and grandiose.

7) Pablo Picasso — Bouquets with Hands (1958)

Picasso is one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century. His oeuvre spans almost 70 years of prolific artistic creation and is so massive that critics divide his work into different periods. Bouquets with Hands is a lithograph print that he created for a peace protest in Stockholm, Sweden from July 16 to July 22, 1958. Two hands from different angles grab an abstract bouquet: lines, blocks and colors create an image, and yet, despite its simplicity, there’s also a deep political message, similar to his monumental work Guernica. The print, which has also been called Bouquet of Peace or Bouquet of Flowers, is now a famous and widely-distributed image.

8) Vik Muniz — Flowers in a Blue and White Vase, After Chardin (2005)

Brazilian artist Vik Muniz (b. 1961) is largely known for his works that recreate historical imagery using a wide range of materials on a monumental scale— including chocolate, sugar, and garbage. Flowers in Blue is inspired by Chagall’s painting and looks almost exactly like it, except that Muniz’s is a collage of tiny circles taken from magazines, whose colors blend together to create a single image. The result is a confetti-like print that clearly depicts flowers in a vase. (Incidentally, Muniz has also created an image of Van Gogh’s sunflowers engineered from blocks of color, which both resemble and are distinct from the original work.)