Flowers: Our Perennial Muse
To bloom, thrive and flourish.
Flowers have long been associated with spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities, enlivening spaces and objects, from marble columns to granny squares.
Simple floral motifs are ubiquitous, attesting to their universal appeal as a visual language. The meaning flowers can convey are numerous — purity, rebirth, goodwill, happiness, amongst others.
Artists have strived to incorporate floral motifs in their art, contributing to the prevalence of lotuses and peonies in Asiatic art along with daffodils and lilies in various Greco-Roman paintings.
But how did flowers become our de-facto muse?
Documenting Nature’s Remedies
Our fascination with flowers may have stemmed from practical impulses.
The first instances of ‘botanic illustration’ in the Western world can be traced back as far as the first century, as medical diagrams in De Material Medica (On Medical Material) by Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides.
These hand-draw illustrations served the utilitarian purpose of documenting a plant’s medicinal properties.
Another prime example of this is the Arabic herbal guide, Kitab fi al-adwiya al-mufrada (Book of Simple Drugs), handwritten by Andalusian physician Abu Ja’far Al-Ghafiqi in the 13th century.
As medicine advanced, these illustrations were reproduced by hand and additional information is included, with varying degrees of similarity to their original copies.
Asian Paragon of Beauty
Elsewhere in Asia, early proponents of botanical art favoured the visual spectacle of flowers rather than their healing qualities. Floral patterns were already a mainstay in the visual lexicon of Asian art, replete in textiles such as silk and ikat, and monumentalised in marble and wood for their transcendental beauty and cultural symbolism.
From Japanese flower arrangement, ikebana, to Indian rangoli, there existed rich traditions of floral crafts long before the first medical compendiums.
During the Tang dynasty (8th to 12th century), peonies were adored in China for their connotations of beauty and fortune and were thus intricately embroidered onto lavish silk tapestries along with other natural sceneries. These ravishing blooms were juxtaposed with other exuberant elements in huaniaohua or ‘flower and bird paintings’. We see this reverence for the “king of flowers” even today, not only in classical scroll paintings, but also in ceramics and stonework such as Ming dynasty porcelain.
Aside from their rich socio-cultural significance, the spiritual undertones of flowers run deep.
The lotus, for one, is considered sacred to both Hindu and Buddhist cultures. Believed to represent the purity of the body and mind, it floats above the water, unsullied by the muddy waters of attachment and desire.
Adorning the statues of deities and bodhisattvas far and wide, the lotus is heavily imbued with religious symbolism, giving rise to its ubiquity in temples and shrines across Asia.
However, perhaps no love for florals can rival that of the Mughal-era rulers (16th to 19th century). Building on past Gujarat legacies, the reign of Jahangir from the 17th century cemented the role of stylised floral patterns in Indian textiles and beyond.
Through opulent pietra dura (hard stone) patterns on marble inlays, Shah Jahan later continued to purvey his father’s keen affection for florals onto architectural marvels, the most iconic being the Taj Mahal.
Colonial Incursions
In the 18th and 19th century, Dutch and British East India officials commissioned local painters to capture visual ethnographies and native biodiversity of the region by adapting Western conventions of painting.
This led to the meteoric rise of Company Painting in India, which blended locals’ miniature painting with a European emphasis on perspective and depth, or what we are familiar with today.
Closer to home, the flora and fauna of the Straits Settlements (now part of Malaysia and Singapore) also piqued the interest of British officials. Singapore’s first Resident, William Farquhar was one of these avid naturalists that had a penchant to discover and catalog the region’s flora.
In line with the mixed style of the Company school artisans, his collection of watercolour paintings reflected an intermingling of aesthetic traditions from their local counterparts and colonial imperatives.
Worlds Collide
However, this fusion of creative sensibilities was not always founded on colonial expediency. Jesuit priest Giuseppe Castiglione’s interpretation of bird and flower paintings is one such example.
Meticulously painted onto silk, his large-scale compositions merged Baroque realism with evocative Chinese brushwork, heralding a new style in the Qing dynasty (17th — 20th century). With subjects ranging from carnations to magnolias, Castiglione’s delicate renditions of quintessential Chinese icons magnified the allure of flowers across audiences.
The enduring legacy of flowers is undoubtedly universal.
In Europe, flowers were perhaps most iconically celebrated in the Art Nouveau movement. If the names Gaudi, Klimt or Mucha ring a bell, you’ve probably seen one of their iconic buildings, murals or posters renowned for their elegant designs with sinuous, natural curves inspired by japonisme and the Arts and Crafts movement. From furniture to jewellery, Art Nouveau featured floral leitmotifs alongside evocative depictions of women to connote eclectic notions of sexuality within a vision of a pastoral idyll.
Natural or Man-Made
Contemporary forms of botanical art have outlived its predecessors through modernist interpretations of nature. In modern architecture and product design, nature and its geometric forms serve as sources of inspiration for many. Biomimicry, for example, transposes biological systems of nature onto tangible biomimetic forms of designs.
Singapore’s very own Esplanade is one such divisive use of biomimicry, as domes coated with thorny aluminum sunshades to mimic the durian fruit.
Form aside, flora and fauna are pivotal to colour and texture in visual design fields such as printmaking, photography and illustration. Whether it is painstakingly hand-spun silk, cotton or manufactured paper, these natural materials have profoundly shaped our visual language.
From the deep indigos in the Japanese shibori dyeing technique to the soga, a type of earthly brown dye, in batik, the natural landscape offers an abundance of lush colours in pigments and inks.
It’s no wonder that colours such as lavender, sage and beetroot, have no substitutes for their namesakes.
“Art brings a form of communication that becomes more impressionable than the object itself,” muses paper sculptor Diana Beltran Herrera as she talks through her process of recreating botanical examples.
In Herrera’s stylistic rendition of a papaya, we are immediately struck by the affecting orange hue of the paper. Be it vinyl posters of trees flanking our walkways or the LEGO flower bouquets at our coffee tables, our preoccupation with nature often stems from how its stylistic representation contends with its original image.
Botanical art today constitutes a motley of meanings, from sophisticated illustrations charting their scientific uses to vivacious offshoots of shapes and colours that pay homage to their precursors. Whether it is resist-dye techniques or Art Nouveau jewellery, artists and craftsmen alike have long been captivated by the ephemeral beauty of flowers and continue to seek inspiration from nature’s masterpieces in new creative expressions.
All books featured in this article can be found in library@orchard’s collection. Keep up to date with our artist residencies and workshops by checking out our GoLibrary collection.
Text by
Elizabeth Ang
National Library Board
