I first came across the idea of a secret language hidden in 17th- and 18th-century Dutch still-life flower paintings at the National Art Library. I was reading a dusty, out-of-date catalogue for the Linda Daisy Ward Collection at the Ashmolean Museum, desperate to gain some understanding of these exquisitely beautiful but inscrutable pictures. While looking at the endless glossy bouquets, set against black backgrounds, I began to feel that there was something a little uncanny about them; I was seeing everything and yet missing something, and these eternal bouquets didn’t quite add up. Something present and yet just out of reach. Was it simply that the pictures were painted too far back in time to be fully apprehended by modern eyes? When I discovered the possibility of a secret language within the pictures, things finally made sense.
Still-life paintings appear to make honesty a primary virtue, but if you look a little closer things are not always what they seem. In the case of Dutch flower studies, the arrangements portrayed could never have existed – the blooms belong to different seasons and were certainly not painted from life in the short time that a vase of flowers lasts. Knowing that they were often painted over the course of a year from a melange of studies, and that artists such as the celebrated painter Rachel Ruysch learnt how to preserve flowers and insects (allowing her the freedom to override the perishable nature of the subject and create magnificent compositions), casts these floral compositions in a deceptive – or, rather, more fantastical – light. Then there’s the matter of their secret symbolism – a folkloric idea so appealing that it has persisted for centuries. If there is a hidden code, does it confront the interpreter with moral messages? Is it a didactic reminder of how to live within strict moral guidelines, achieve spiritual growth, resist earthly temptation; an embodiment of the Protestant idea of wise choice?
Bart Cornelis is curator of the collection Dutch and Flemish Paintings 1600–1800 at London’s National Gallery and of the exhibition Dutch Flower Paintings: Exploring Art in Bloom at the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield, where masterpieces from the National Gallery by such artists as Ruysch, Jan van Huysman and Ambroisius Bosschaert the Elder are currently on show. A proponent of modern rational scholarship, he prefers to see the pictures for their artistic merit and art-historical value, and explains that the problem with the debate around their hidden meanings is that there is no contemporary source material to show how they were experienced when they were first painted. Although Cornelis is sure that there were many more flower paintings from the time and that only the best of these have survived, he insists that there is not a sermon intentionally hidden by the artist in each bouquet. However, this does not necessarily mean that one can’t be found…
The question of how much of a hidden floral ‘syntax’ is present in these works will always remain a mystery (one can only wonder what future generations will project onto one of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings). But as flower painting expert Fred G. Meijer explained to me, it is not so much that there is a secret language, more that there is a lost language associated with these artworks. At the time the still-lifes were made, the meanings attached to elements in them were common knowledge. They provided a rare opportunity to go beyond the surface of the pictures and enjoy fragmented glimpses of the mindset of the original owners, breathing life into these silent bouquets.
In order to fully appreciate the symbolic language of flowers, it is necessary to relax our contemporary rational mindset a little and enter that of the 17th-century Low Countries. This was a profoundly Protestant society; life was laced with moralising proverbs about how to be virtuous and underpinned by the idea of transience. The fascinating study Dutch and Flemish Flower Pieces, Volume 1 (2020), by Sam Segal and Klara Alen, details many possible meanings of elements that reappear in still lifes of the period.
The foolishness of lust and the short-lived nature of beauty find expression in the beautiful pink centifolia rose: if her petals are falling and she is overblown, her beauty is over. A white rose stands for true love. One of the symbols of the futility of greed is the striped purple or red tulip Semper Augustus – one of the costliest and most prized flowers during ‘Tulip Mania’, when speculators raised the value of bulbs to an astronomical level before the market spectacularly crashed in 1637. Meanwhile, the purple-and-red-striped tulip ‘Viceroy’ (painted after the boom-and-bust) alludes to the foolishness of humanity. (Clearly, this message was not heeded: ‘Hyacinth Mania’ followed a hundred years later.) More generally, browned, damaged, or dying flowers are a vanitas – a reminder of death in life. Many blooms represent the Virgin; carnations, lilies of the valley, and lilies are considered virtuous, while strawberries symbolise fertility. Often, objects have a double meaning: a walnut can represent the Trinity or marriage, for example. Night is represented by red poppies, day by sunflowers, and the seasons by flowers (spring), corn (summer), fruit (autumn) and root vegetables (winter).
The list of symbolic associations is fascinating and almost endless. Perhaps most curious of all are the meanings that can be attached to insects included in the works. These small, charming details are possibly the most powerful messengers of all. Butterflies and dragonflies indicate spiritual growth; a snail reminds us to be self-contained and of the importance of keeping secrets; a stag beetle represents Christ. Ants symbolise diligence, frugality and saving for a rainy day. Remarkably, humble caterpillars, which are often found in these paintings, are the most significant of all, symbolising mankind and the resurrection of the contemplative soul – in particular how we are bound to earthly existence and carry the burden of sin, but also have the possibility of transformation. Interestingly, at the time these paintings were made, it was necessary to know the Latin name of each creature to fully appreciate its symbolism, which produced an extra layer of meaning, some of which has been lost to time.
Flower pictures were all the rage in a society that loved, worked with and collected flowers, one that had a strong connection to the symbolic, both in terms of faith and connection to the natural world. That said, perhaps they just liked their seemingly straightforward art to have a twist. On the surface, the paintings offer huge scope for connoisseurship, conversation and comparison. The original owners – royalty and well-to-do merchants – were, of course, highly knowledgeable about flowers and art, but did they also use this ‘vernacular’ flower language to their own ends, exploring the pictures with friends or children, pointing out the meanings and messages that suited their situation? We can only imagine that some of them did, much like we are doing today.
‘Dutch Flower Paintings: Exploring Art in Bloom’ runs at the Millennium Gallery, Arundel Gate, Sheffield S1 2PP, until 17 September 2023. For details, visit sheffieldmuseums.org.uk
