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Wall Street Journal

‘Botanical Revolutions' Review: To Paint the Lily

Holland's talented 17th-century painters are partly to blame for the madness of Tulipmania: Their delicate depictions of the flowers, compiled in catalogs (or tulpenboeks) and shipped across Europe, inspired some speculators who then drove the prices of rare tulip bulbs to absurd levels. The red-marbled watercolor petals of 'Two Tulips' (above, ca. 1637, by an anonymous artist) might have prompted a Dutchman to drop thousands of guilders on the exotic flowers, enough at that time to buy a mansion. His investment eventually wilted, but interest in such paintings helped the Dutch art market bloom. In 'Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art,' Giovanni Aloi offers a rich bouquet of vegetal art, including a 16th-century Aztec manuscript illustrating medical herbs and Ansel Adams's ghostly photograph 'Redwoods, Bull Creek Flat, Northern California' (ca. 1960). Even weeds prove historic, as in Albrecht Dürer's meticulous 1503 watercolor 'The Great Piece of Turf.' Plants have also long provided artmaking material for artists. Some 50,000 years ago, humans crushed red berries and painted water lilies onto cave walls in modern-day Australia. Johannes Vermeer relied on dye from rubia tinctorum to add blush to his subject's cheeks in 'The Girl With a Wine Glass' (ca. 1659). Sixteenth-century Venetian craftsmen mastered a process of stretching woven hemp into paintable canvases, which made art more portable and later enabled the plein-air work of artists such as Claude Monet—who declared his Giverny garden his 'greatest masterpiece.' Mr. Aloi, who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, drops in colorful anecdotes at opportune moments, explaining how tall grasses inspired Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie-style architecture; and how monstera leaves birthed Henri Matisse's cutouts, as in the joyous 'La Gerbe' (1953). The text is occasionally spoiled by dour soliloquies on the West's 'false guise of purity' or life's 'all-pervading sense of meaninglessness'—but no rose is without its thorn.