Beautiful old botanical paintings of cacti 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. …
Plant Curator often daydreams about spending a few months at this time of year doing a photographic tour of the Californian desert wildflower regions. The ultimate plant lovers road trip would involve going south to north, from desert hotspot to desert hotspot, catching like dominos, the peak blooms in each place. In reality it’s not …
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. While the book was written by Kohler, the pictures were drawn by artists L. Müeller and C.F. Schmidt. They were …
Primavera (springtime) was painted in Renaissance Italy around 1480 by the artist Sandro Botticelli. It’s quite a large piece, almost life size, measuring 2.03m by 3.14m. If you want to view in person, you will need to visit the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. If that’s not possible, a high resolution digital image (above) is …
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 …