Muses are most natural to artists: flowers

Nature has been a theme repeated by artists in their works for centuries. Flowers, in addition to being beautiful, have become an incredible way to practice with multiple techniques, shapes, and colors of artistic work. No wonder that the natural beauty of flowers has drawn the attention of artists throughout the ages, from ancient times to modern times. And not only because of their enigma, but because of what they represented in the scenes of painters and other artists, who represented them in many still lives, as added elements, and also in many creative and unique ways.

See More

We list 10 artists who used flowers as muses in various periods of their lives and the significance they have or had in the history of art.

Ambrose Bosschaert

Bosschaert was an early Teutonic still life painter and one of the first artists to create floral still life as a separate genre. Special in certain improvements, paintings, tulips, roses, and other cultivated flowers abundantly and as much as possible to life, in three recurring themes: flowers in a vase, on a table, or in a window.

Edouard Manet: lilac and roses

He continued to paint flowers throughout his career, but in the last six months of his life he devoted himself to painting only floral still lifes. Many of his friends brought him flowers when they visited the patient and painted them afterwards. Although he had health problems, he did not consider his paintings, but the beauty that the artist saw in the flowers and the way they were contemplated.

Claudius Monet: water lilies

From 1897 until his death, Monet changed his traditional subjects and devoted himself mainly to painting one subject: water lilies. He was particularly inspired by the flower garden at his home in Giverny and painted more than 250 water lilies of many sizes and played with perspective, even according to curators moving away from traditional impressionism and closer to the intensity of expressionism. Monet began arranging his possessions like a large canvas in himself, planting water lilies and other exotic plants and then painting them, so that in his words “the garden became my greatest masterpiece”.

Vincent Van Gogh: Sunflowers

Van Gogh became an artist at the age of 27 and created works that included self-portraits, landscapes, and flowers. He found solace in nature, which inspired him time and time again. His flower still strongly defined his life style during his years in Paris and after practicing with the colors of multiple flowers, he began to focus on the specific type of sunflowers. The artist willingly shared himself and wanted to be a painter of sunflowers; he succeeded to his name, a variety of flowers agreeing to the extent that friends brought sunflowers to his funeral. He made five versions of the famous Sunflowers in a Vase.

Henri Matisse: Snowdrops

In the last decade of his life, Matisse (1869-1954) created some 270 works from paper cutouts. When he had already developed this medium to model painting, he left two hospital surgeries, so he began to work more with skins, because he could sit more easily. Many of these cut-out designs are consistent with simpler shapes superimposed on large and bold, distinctly colored shapes. His various works of snow flowers placed in different places suggest that he was inspired by snow, the white flower that blooms in early spring.

Piet Mondrian: Chrysanthemums

Mondrian is known for his abstract style of painting, but early in his career he published more than 250 paintings of nature and flowers, many of them chrysanthemums. The artist often painted a single flower, rather than a box, to better express its structure. In those words: “I find them beautiful on the outside, but I also look for what they hide in their deepest beauty.”

Didacus Rivera and the gannets

In his works, Rivera repeatedly painted gloves. A sensual and sculptural flower, the artist used them as a symbol of women in his works, and later as a representation of Mexican society, the revolution and the domination of the upper classes over the lower classes, making it the symbol of Mexico. For the same reason, he is often depicted in portraits of native peasants, with a certain anonymity to the figures presented in his works.

Georgia O’Keefe: red cane

O’Keefe’s artwork varied throughout his long career, but the subjects for which he is best known are his radical paintings of New York skyscrapers and, of course, flowers: including carnations, roses, larkspurs, hollyhocks, trumpets and red canes. . Artists looked to flowers as the subject of their art with still life paintings, but O’Keefe changed that when he began painting them as an art form and in his creative approach. The artist wanted viewers to reconnect with the dignity and beauty of nature, which he felt was being forgotten during his time in New York. Although other artists also captured flowers, O’Keefe’s closest character, they are quite unique to him and are often described as romantic; Many critics believe that her feminist themes were ahead of her time.

Clementine the Hunter: zinnias

Hunter was a self-taught painter and was the first African-American artist to have a solo art show at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He began painting in the fifties with rocks and colors left by the artist Alberta Kinsey on the plantation where he lived. The artist is known for his colorful and vibrant paintings inspired by his life on the Melros plantation, where he first worked in the cotton fields and later as a maid and where he paints at night using multiple materials such as canvas. The artist worked from his memories and represented scenes of daily life on the plantation; Zinnias, the most common flower in the southern United States, are a regular theme that I return to again and again.

Andy Warhol: Hibiscus

Warhol began the flower series in June 1964 for an upcoming fall exhibition at the Lion Castle Gallery in New York. The Modern Artist Photography magazine chose a photograph of hibiscus flowers taken by Patricia Caulfield (for which Caulfield was escorted from the courtroom) and played with 24-inch and 48-inch canvases. From this time the artist began to produce flowers in several techniques, scales and variations. Many curators and critics believe that the first flowering paintings were a symbol of mourning and tribute to the recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy, as they were created in the months following his assassination, along with portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy.