A bouquet lasts about a week, and for three centuries flower painters worked against that deadline. Some built vases that no garden could fill in a single season, from drawings made months apart. Others raced the evening light or the end of summer to finish before the flowers in front of them died.
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How These Were Chosen
For centuries, flowers in paintings were details. A lily beside the Virgin Mary stood for her purity and nothing more. Around 1600, a vase of flowers got a panel of its own, and the flower painting began.
A bouquet suited painters. It held still for a few days, gathered every color in one place and set hard tests of skill: petals against the light, a drop of water, a leaf turned to show its underside. Then it faded, which gave the picture a second meaning about how short a life is.
These twelve pictures follow where painters found their flowers. The older bouquets join blooms that never open in the same week, put together from drawings and borrowed gardens. The later ones come out of one garden on one day, often the painter's own.
12. Gustav Klimt, Cottage Garden with Sunflowers (1906)
Garden flowers fill Gustav Klimt's square canvas right up to its four edges: sunflowers, dahlias, marigolds, asters and phlox, with no sky and no horizon anywhere. Where a landscape painter would leave room for distance, Klimt leaves none, and the reason lies in the way he looked at a garden.
In the summer of 1906, Klimt was at the Attersee, a lake in Upper Austria, where he spent every summer from 1900 to 1907 at the Brauhof in Litzlberg. Next door lay the flower beds of a local farmer, Anton Mayr, and that is where he began this canvas.
Klimt did not paint those beds as he found them. He chose his views through a piece of cardboard, a tool he described in August 1902 to Mizzi Zimmermann, his lover at the time, as "a hole cut into a piece of cardboard." The hole was square. Seen through it, a flower bed became a framed patch of color, and the canvas keeps that shape, 110 centimeters on each side.
Inside that square, Klimt flattened the light as well. The large blooms at the front and the tiny dots of flowers at the back receive the same even light, without strong shadow, so the eye finds no depth to walk into. Each kind of flower still keeps its own shape and color: red, star-shaped blooms run down the middle, and blue and violet discs crowd the lower left.
The sunflowers of the title get surprisingly little of that space, and that is what I like most in the picture. Their heads press against the top edge, one of them cut in half by the frame, and the middle of the canvas belongs to their broad gray green leaves.
In 1908 the canvas hung at the Kunstschau in Vienna, in the same room as The Kiss. The critic Günther Freiberg found that Klimt's flower pieces looked like "garishly patterned carpets from which a piece has been cut out and framed." He meant it as a reproach, yet without knowing it he had described the square hole in the cardboard exactly.
At a Glance
Artist: Gustav Klimt (Austrian, 1862 to 1918)
Painted: Begun in the summer of 1906, at the Attersee, Upper Austria
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 110 × 110 cm (43.3 × 43.3 in)
Where to see it: Upper Belvedere, Vienna, which also holds The Kiss
11. Vincent van Gogh, Irises (1889)
Clumps of irises cover a canvas almost a meter wide, their long leaves twisting in every direction above a strip of red brown earth, with one white iris standing apart on the left. Vincent van Gogh set up very close, at the height of the flowers, so that along the lower edge a few blooms nearly touch the bare ground.
He painted them in May 1889 in the garden of the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in his first days there as a patient. In a letter written the day after he arrived, he named the color of these irises, and it is not the color anyone sees on the canvas today.