S3 Ep4: Dutch Art - The Secret of the Missing Flowers

The Whispering Gallery

Join me for some detective work, to find clues about the missing flowers and find out why the Semper Augustus bulb was so highly regarded, and how tulips made it to Holland in the first place. And what's the deal with the missing flowers when they appear to be all accounted for in the Dutch Golden age paintings? Let’s get started and dig into the shadowy garden of secrets.
During the Dutch Golden age a popular category artists painted in was still life and drilling further into that category - floral arrangements. I think the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, Netherlands describes the flower painting best on their web page displaying Flower Still Life by Hans Gillisz Bollinger (1644) oil on wood - they said “A bouquet of striped tulips, a rose, an orange lily, a red and white carnation, stocks and a cyclamen. This is an imaginary bouquet…”
Were these painters of flowers - early fantasy-botanical artists? Recording flowers and sometimes insects, often incorporating broken tulips into their compositions. Broken tulips were a clear favorite of many of the painters. We’ll talk about what broken tulips are soon.
If you’re like me, you might be surprised that tulips didn’t originally come from Holland. Tulips grew wild in the valleys of the heavenly mountains, or the Tian Shan mountains of China. How did tulips end up in Holland? There are so many questions, right?!? It wasn’t from point a to point b.
Thank you so much for your company and for listening! Keep your flashlight close and your spooky art stories closer while visiting the Whispering gallery.
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Episode Image: Semper Augustus, artist unknown, before 1640, gouache on paper, height: 30.8 cm (12.1 in); width: 20 cm (7.8 in), Norton Simon Museum https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Semper_Augustus_Tulip_17th_century.jpg
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