Flower paintings at Kettle's Yard (July 2026)

 

Doron Langberg, Hibiscus I, 2022

Painting flowers is one of the most obvious subjects for painting, so you wonder why there are not more flower painting exhibitions. Perhaps the organisers – and the public – have been put off by the practice followed by many galleries, including the Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam, to group all the flower paintings together in a single room. This practice might make sense if the gallery had a wide ranger of flower paintings, but both galleries choose to display all their 17th-century Dutch flower paintings together. My heard sinks when I see so many similar works together, all with a black background.

Today, the situation is very different. There are many kinds of flower-inspired paintings, and what could be simpler to curate than an exhibition of them? Except that the Kettles Yard team seems to have extended their brief to include works primarily about people (Kay Donachie), or not including any flowers at all (Howard Hodgkin). Limiting ourselves to those works that are of flowers, what struck me was the difference between the skill of the 50 or so artists included (the show only contains one work only from each artist, so the judgements below apply only to these works).

I would imagine a trawl of amateur art exhibitions would reveal thousands of flower painters: flowers are easy to obtain, they typically last a few days (with some exceptions), and are typically colourful, so it should be easy to get a result. Most importantly, they raise little problem of perspective being largely in a single plane.

For me, the magic of flower paintings is that they represent a kind of pure painting. They aren’t about anything other than the flower being depicted. So when the catalogue tells me that a painting honour's the painter's father, I don't get it.  

Nonetheless, a few paintings stood out very clearly in this show. 

David Jones: a lovely demonstration of watercolour without, as far as I could see, any preparatory drawing, with light flowing, as it were, through the leaves and petals. 

Cass Namoda: a dramatic close-up of part of a single flower, with not enough space within the picture to display the whole. 

Doron Langberg: very rough daubs of bright pink, against green, give a powerful suggestion of hibiscus. The image is representational, but only just. 

William Nicholson: always one to provide a witty commentary on the ostensible subject, Nicholson includes a dramatic shadow that almost obscures the foliage below the peonies. 

Cedric Morris: the viewer appears to be in the middle of an almost exploding bunch of flowers, filling the rectangular canvas with bright, living colours. This man can paint the essence of flowers better than anyone else in the show! His paintings of people are never as good. 

Judith Tucker: A very dramatic view of sea asters against a dark background. The leaves especially are a vivid orange, yet the background is dark, so the effect is somewhat surreal. Undeniable is the power of the piece. Looking up sea asters in Wikipedia suggested their flowers are not that different to any other aster, and not very dramatic: the focus here is on the leaves.

What did I dismiss? Any artist who included human figures, since, in my opinion, the human figure directs the viewer how to interpret the image. Thus, Caroline Walker, whose naturalistic depictions of home life complete with child are not, I think, flower paintings. Charles Rennie Mackintosh is included for a fritillary sketch, but it looked too small-scale in the context of an exhibition gallery.

In summary: great show, but it would have been better to have included a few examples from earlier centuries, especially the 17th century.