Grass

Grass, belonging to the family Poaceae (also called Gramineae), is one of the most frequently depicted natural motifs in art, appearing in 91 works in the collection. As a large and nearly ubiquitous family of monocotyledonous flowering plants, true grasses include cereal crops, bamboos, natural grassland species, and lawn and pasture cultivars. With approximately 780 genera and around 12,000 species, Poaceae ranks as the fifth-largest plant family. Its economic significance is unparalleled among plant families, providing staple foods including wheat, rice, maize, oats, barley, and millet, which together supply a substantial portion of global dietary energy. Grasslands such as savannahs and prairies cover an estimated 40.5 percent of Earth's land area, excluding Greenland and Antarctica, making grass an inescapable element of landscape representation across cultures and periods.

In art, grass carries multivalent symbolism rooted in its biological and cultural properties. Its capacity for regeneration, growing from the base of the blade rather than elongated stem tips, has served as a metaphor for resilience and renewal. The family's morphological characteristics, hollow stems called culms plugged at nodes, narrow alternate leaves with parallel veins, and distinctive spikelet inflorescences, provide artists with recognizable visual markers. Economically, grasses symbolize sustenance and civilization through their association with domesticated cereals. The contrast between cultivated lawns, pastures, and wild grasslands has allowed artists to encode notions of human order versus natural wilderness. In religious and mythological contexts, grass's ephemeral quality, annual species completing their life cycle in a single growing season, has supported meditations on mortality and the passage of time. The German distinction between Süßgräser (sweet grasses) and Sauergräser (sour grasses), based on nutritional value, hints at how grass types carried implicit moral or utilitarian judgments in certain cultural contexts.

The persistent depiction of grass across 91 works in this collection testifies to its enduring hold on the artistic imagination. This legacy rests on the fundamental tension between grass's humble ubiquity and its profound importance to human survival and landscape experience. As the most economically important plant family, providing rice, wheat, maize, and other staples, grass connects artistic representation to agricultural civilization. The scientific understanding of grass morphology, from hollow culms and parallel-veined leaves to wind-pollinated spikelets, has informed increasingly accurate botanical depiction, even as artistic movements have used grass to pursue diverse aesthetic goals. The coverage of grasslands across over 40 percent of terrestrial habitats ensures that this motif will remain central to landscape art. The collection's range, from intimate portraits to expansive historical scenes, from Dutch polders to Swiss lakeshores, demonstrates that grass functions as a universal artistic language, adaptable to any context where human figures and narratives meet the natural world.