The grace and glory, the exultant euphoria of successful flower painting

Art is not going to the dogs in every field. Take flower painting. The Ancient Egyptians were depicting garden scenes from about 2000 bc, especially in private tombs, painting with delight and verisimilitude plants such as the mandrake, the red poppy, cornflowers and (a favourite) the blue and white lotus. In Europe, mediaeval and Renaissance art was intensely floriated, and German artists, especially Dürer, painted flowers with almost religious passion, accuracy and grace. But it was in the Netherlands that flower painting evolved into a special art form. Entire families of gifted and dedicated artists such as Ambrosius Bosschaert, his three sons Ambrosius the Younger, Johannes and Abraham, and his brother-in-law Balthasar van der Ast, did virtually nothing else but construct elaborate flower pieces, in oil, usually on copper or special board, to adorn the state rooms of wealthy Dutch merchants and officials, who themselves ‘collected’ special blooms, especially tulips, and scientific botany books. So the flowers depicted had to be minutely accurate.

These artists, and others such as Roelandt Savery, Jan Brueghel the Elder and his pupil Daniel Seghers were obliged by the taste of their rich patrons to provide bouquets, in elaborate vases, of flowers whose blossoming took place over the entire spring and summer, so the finished product in oils could never be painted in one campaign, as it were. Instead they compiled elaborate studies in pencil, ink and watercolour throughout the year and then, when they got a special commission — often listing the flowers to be displayed — transferring the studies to the copper or panel. Patrons often requested that fruit, especially grapes and peaches, be mingled with the blooms. There were four essential characteristics of this form of high art: an enamel-like finish, the minimal of overlapping so that each flower is revealed almost in its entirety, even lighting to make possible a radial composition, usually an oval, which fills three quarters of the picture, and cunning background effects to anchor the floral vessel firmly in space.