Long before Victorian flower dictionaries, painters used blooms as a vocabulary that churchgoers, scholars and friends could read. Over four centuries the code left the altar for the botanist's table and the private joke. In one portrait on this page, a few violets on a black dress spell out the sitter's first name.
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How These Were Chosen
The language of flowers is the old habit of giving each bloom a meaning: a lily for purity, a rose for love, a poppy for sleep and death. A flower lets a picture say what its figures cannot.
Victorian dictionaries printed these meanings in the 1800s, but painters had relied on them for centuries. The code began in the Church, where every flower pointed to the Virgin or to Christ, and then passed to the scientists who set out to classify plants.
A picture belongs here when its flowers say something its figures do not, or when its painter chose to leave them silent. The latest painters to take up the code used flowers for private messages, tied to a friend, a wife or a studio they hoped to share.
12. Mary Delany, Passiflora laurifolia (1777)
Purple and white filaments fan out from a passion flower set against a black ground, while a second bloom hangs half closed on the right and thin tendrils curl up the stem. Up close, there is no brushwork anywhere. Mary Delany cut the whole picture from colored paper in 1777, piece by piece, when she was in her late seventies.
She had come to this work late. Her second husband, the Irish clergyman Patrick Delany, died in 1768, and a few years later she began what she called her "paper mosaicks." Over about ten years she finished 985 of them, most at Bulstrode Park in Buckinghamshire, the home of her close friend the Duchess of Portland.
Elsewhere on this list, flowers speak of faith or of love. Delany's passion flower speaks the language of science, and the code is written in the sheet's catalogue title. After the name of the species, Passiflora laurifolia, Latin for the laurel-leaved passion flower, come two more words: Gynandria Pentandria.
Those two words need a little explaining. They come from Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who in 1735 published a system that sorted flowering plants by counting their reproductive parts. Gynandria grouped the flowers whose stamens, the male organs that carry pollen, are joined to the pistil, the female organ. Pentandria meant five stamens.
With that key in hand, the collage reads like a lesson. In the center of the open bloom, a small cluster of pale yellow pieces rises above the purple fringe, and they are exactly the parts Linnaeus counted. The broad oval leaf at the bottom of the sheet, for its part, accounts for the word laurifolia.
The scientists of her day noticed. Sir Joseph Banks, the naturalist who became president of the Royal Society in 1778, said these collages were the only imitations of nature from which he could describe a plant botanically "without the least fear of committing an error."
At a Glance
Artist: Mary Delany (1700 to 1788)
Made: 1777 (a paper collage, not a painting)
Medium: Collage of colored papers
Size: 35.2 × 24.2 cm (13 7/8 × 9 1/2 in)
Where to see it: British Museum, London (Department of Prints and Drawings)
11. Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers (August 1888)
Sunflowers crowd a two-toned vase on a yellow table, against a pale yellow wall, some in full bloom and others stripped down to a heavy seed head. Amid all that yellow, one cool note stands out: a first name written in blue on the vase. Vincent van Gogh signed it in Arles in August 1888, while racing the wilting flowers to finish a set of canvases for a guest who had still not arrived.