Jan van Huysum, (detail) Vase of Flowers, 1722. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Flowers console and comfort with their inexhaustible variety and beauty. From ancient times, empresses and kings decorated palaces with Secret Gardens painted on their walls. The Egyptians painted gardens ‘in the afterlife’ with lily ponds and fish. In the Middle Ages the concept of the Secret Garden was transformed into a person, a much loved and revered woman - The Virgin Mary. She is represented by roses, and in cathedrals her character is described by the sacred geometry of the rose windows. Troubadours also sang of courtly love in the Walled Garden, while the ‘garden of the five senses’ became the forest in which the Unicorn is hunted.
Italian fruit baskets take on an allegorical rôle in the hands of Caravaggio in the 17th century, while the Dutch masters make immortal many species of flowers, all buzzing with insects and butterflies. By the 19th century Europe was blighted with revolution and instability, yet Edouard Manet uses flowers to describe the women of Paris, and is comforted on his deathbed by just two anemones in a tooth mug. Vincent van Gogh pours his hope into his Sunflowers and Irises, and is then treated with the poisonous foxglove. Claude Monet’s joy was his garden at Giverny.
In this beautiful talk, Hilary Hope Guise shows how flowers bring their brilliance, vulnerability and silence into our lives
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This is an online event hosted on Zoom which can be watched live, or on-demand for one month afterwards. You will receive your link to access the event in your email confirmation and the on-demand link after the event ends.