Celia Birtwell has been immortalised by David Hockney in his painting Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-71), a painting cherished here mostly for the blue vase full of lilies resting on the table. Birtwell’s appearance in this famous painting is by no means her most significant achievement, being a successful and lauded fabric designer in her own …
Kate Bush, Sensual World, 1989 (Gardenia) Andy Warhol (Sunflowers) Michael Cera (Cactus) Billie Holiday (Gardenia) Rudolf Nureyev, 1963 (Roses) View image | gettyimages.com Truman Capote by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1947 (Alocasia macrorrhiza) Michael Jackson (Lilies and more) Joan Allen as Georgia O’Keeffe (Poppies) Jean-Paul Gaultier, by Paul & Gilles (Daisies) U2 by Anton Corbijn (Joshua Tree) …
Marguerite Kelsey and a magnolia by Meredith Frampton, 1928 What an exquisite specimen. The woman is quite lovely too. When Meredith Frampton (1894 – 1984) painted Marguerite Kelsey’s portrait in 1928 he achieved excellence, stunningly matching her particular kind of beauty with a particularly beautiful plant. This is an image that is all about poise and pride, class …
Self Portrait by Christian Schad (1927) Having a narcissus flower staring you in the face can only really mean one thing – you’re a vain so and so. Not that the flower symbolism in Christian Schad’s Self-Portrait is really needed, as the artist’s obsession with showing off his chest in a see-through top, rather than …
For those of us with botanical leanings, there is something slightly less satisfying about looking at a famous painting of a plant without knowing the exact species rendered. It’s equivalent to looking at a photograph of a captivating face from some faraway land and never knowing the person’s name or if they even agreed to …
If you are making a living out of photography, you must be good. If you are making a living out of wild plant photography you’re a genius. There is not much call for wild plant photographs these days, especially macro shots that offer a portrait of an individual plant. Some talented individuals have success with …
Some old free botanical cacti art today from the book: “Iconographie descriptive des cactees, ou, Essais systematiques et raisonnes sur l’histoire naturelle, la classification et la culture des plantes de cette famille“. Which translates (roughly) to: Featured iconography cacti, or systematic and reasoned essays on natural history, classification and cultivation of plants in this family. …
Franz Eugen Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen or Medicinal Plants was published in 1887 in Germany. It comes in four volumes and includes over 300 detailed, beautiful, botanical illustrations of plants. Below we supply 88 from Volume 1. The book was written by Kohler but the pictures were drawn by artists L. Müeller and C.F. Schmidt. They were …
Usually you can see Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia at Tate Britain, but it was recently loaned out to Japan and now is in Turin, after that maybe somewhere else. It is good to share. For most interested people around the globe a digital or printed image is all that they are ever likely to …
Pascal Wyse and Joe Berger are two witty, silly, offbeat gentlemen, who go by the moniker of Berger & Wyse when producing some super cartoons together for The Weekend Guardian among others. Of particular interest to us are the talking fruit and vegetable cartoons from their food series. Here are a few of our favourites below, …