Art: Flowering Art

As hotelkeepers know, the safest picture to hang in a hotel bedroom is a flower print: it makes nobody mad, except an occasional connoisseur. That flower-painting can be as handsome and as accurate as Audubon’s birds was proved last week in San Francisco.

On exhibit at San Francisco’s De Young Museum were 440 watercolors from the days when the scientific picturing of flowers was an art, not a craft. The water-colors were the work of a talented early 19th Century French painter-naturalist, Pancrace Bessa.

When he painted his colors on parchment, every large French estate had its garden and greenhouse. All over the world, horticulturists were discovering exciting new plants. A new method of stipple engraving had made possible excellent prints in color. At Paris’ Jardin des Plantes, men combining botanical knowledge with high artistic ability labored to record the new plants. The most famous of them was Pierre Joseph Redouté, sometimes called the “Raphael of flowers.” Bessa was less prolific than his contemporaries, and his prints are rarer. But many collectors now consider him the greatest flower-painter of them all.

The watercolors exhibited in San Francisco were the originals (insured at $1,000 apiece) for eight volumes of Herbier Général de I’Amateur. Most were of wild flowers, less than half of them native to France. There were scabiosa from the Caucasus, pink periwinkles from Madagascar, sow thistle from the Canary Islands, chrysanthemums and yellow jasmine from China, lilacs from western Asia, and even some California wild flowers collected by a Russian expedition, taken to St. Petersburg and eventually transplanted to Paris. Even in reproduction, no hotelkeeper had anything like it.