Painted Flowers in Later Seventeenth-Century English Portraits

Abstract

In many later seventeenth-century English portraits female sitters are often placed beside flowers arranged in vases or urns, holding blooms in their laps, threading floral garlands or surrounded by blossoms in idealised landscape settings. But who actually painted these flowers, in some cases beautifully and naturalistically rendered? How was their particular expertise regarded by contemporaries? What light might these works shed on the likely collaboration between the ‘painter of faces,’ the portraitist, and the specialist flower painter, brought in to give greater horticultural specificity and variety? And given the wide interest in horticulture, were there any non-professional flower painters in England during this period? With reference to specific examples of portraits of women, this chapter seeks to address these questions.