Plant

Plant is a subject in art. The gallery holds 130 works in this subject in art, including works by Titian, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot and Pierre Auguste Cot.

Plants are the eukaryotic, predominantly photosynthetic organisms that constitute the kingdom Plantae, drawing their energy from sunlight. As a subject in art, however, the plant is far older than the science that names it: leaves, blossoms, vines and trees have ornamented human image-making since antiquity. Plants first emerged as a rigorous subject in their own right through the illustrated herbal, a medical-botanical genre that reached its height in the sixteenth century. The landmark is Leonhart Fuchs's *De historia stirpium commentarii insignes* (1542), whose 511 woodcuts—all drawn from life—set a standard of botanical accuracy that endured for centuries and were copied, sometimes from the same blocks, by later authors such as Rembert Dodoens and Caspar Bauhin.

The flower piece became an independent painting genre in the early seventeenth-century Netherlands. Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, working in Middelburg, was among its founders, painting on copper to achieve jewel-like precision through layered glazes. Such bouquets were rarely mere decoration: they carried vanitas meanings—the brevity of life, the certainty of death—and reflected the era's botanical obsessions, including the speculative 'tulip mania' of 1634–37, when the tulip signalled virtue and nobility.

The genre's supreme practitioners were Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750), daughter of an Amsterdam anatomy and botany professor, who built an internationally famous six-decade career, and Jan van Huysum, regarded as the last of the great Dutch flower painters, who lightened both palette and backgrounds in the eighteenth century. Van Huysum's *Flowers in an Urn*, held in this collection, exemplifies his dense, asymmetrical opulence and minutely observed petals, insects and dewdrops.

Beyond the vase, plants shaped landscape painting. The Barbizon School worked *en plein air* among the trees and grasslands of Fontainebleau, and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot—represented here by *The Repose* and *Bacchante by the Sea*—evolved from near-photographic foliage toward soft, dappled canopies of dabs and daubs that anticipated Impressionism. Paul Joseph Constantin Gabriël's *A Windmill on a Polder Waterway* sets reeds and meadow against a Dutch sky.

This long engagement fed later movements: Art Nouveau drew its whiplash lines and ornament directly from native flora, while botanical illustration continues as both science and art, confirming the plant as one of art's most enduring and adaptable subjects.