Flora

About

Flowers, leaves, trees and grasses appear in art as symbol, specimen, ornament and portrait. Chinese painters took plum blossom, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum, the ‘Four Gentlemen’, as emblems of a scholar's virtues, and Ogata Kōrin reduced a stream bank to repeating blue irises on gold screens in the early 18th century. Albrecht Dürer's watercolour Great Piece of Turf (1503) gives ordinary weeds full attention.

Rachel Ruysch built flower pieces of impossible abundance, joining blooms from different seasons, and Maria Sibylla Merian's plates of Surinam plants and insects (1705) came from her own fieldwork. The Vincennes porcelain factory made lifelike flowers for the French court in the 1740s and 1750s. Anna Atkins's Photographs of British Algae (1843) used cyanotype to print specimens directly, William Morris printed thrushes among fruit in Strawberry Thief (1883), and Georgia O'Keeffe's close-up blooms of the 1920s fill the canvas edge to edge.