Jai Chuhan’s vigorous, energetic flower painting was created in a single sitting in her studio – a rare example of the artist working directly from life. There is an obscure patchwork of other canvases in the background. The organic floral shapes contrast with the architectural space of the studio, but the subject and setting are united by the rich vibrancy of colour: intense reds, deep blues and luminous pinks. Chuhan’s impressionistic, impasto painted flowers embody personal memories, art historical references and ecological concerns, accumulated by the artist over the course of her life.
While much of Chuhan’s work focuses on human figures in interiors and cityscapes, flowers have appeared in her paintings throughout her artistic career. As a young child she was captivated by Claude Monet’s paintings of waterlilies which she encountered at the National Gallery in London soon after she moved to the UK from India. She has often depicted flowers alongside postcards and domestic ephemera, pointing to their role as an adornment in the home. They are also included in her depictions of pregnant women, referencing the floral bouquets given in celebration of a baby’s birth, as well as symbolising the cyclical nature of life.
Inspired by examples across the history of art, from Indian miniatures to Francis Bacon, Chuhan explores the ability of flowers to encapsulate different experiences of time. She believes that humans are innately drawn to flowers, saying, ‘I think we are hardwired to be attracted to the bright colours and shapes. They are incredibly important for their symbolism, their beauty, their transitory nature.’ MB
Flowers II, 2008 Oil on canvas
91 x 77 cm
Courtesy the artist
Born 1954 Lubaina Himid
Forget-me-nots, peonies, dahlias, tulips, palm leaves and many other flowers appear in a kaleidoscopic array in Lubaina Himid’s painting These Are For You. The display of flowers, contained within psychedelic forms, spills out of the square composition and onto the painted frame. The border itself is painted a leaf-like green and features decorative details on each of its four corners, which draw out colours from the main composition. Arranged like a patchwork of mementoes, the flowers are like a secret language for the viewer to decipher and translate.
Like in many of Himid’s works, there is a balance between the regularity of the pattern and the originality of each form. Floral motifs recur throughout her work, including her largescale paintings, installations, prints, textiles and ceramics. Human figures feature prominently in her paintings, but her visual language is also informed by organic forms and colours. Himid’s compositions are often inspired by her collection of East African kangas – fabrics with a large decorative border and a central motif painted in vivid colours, a format echoed in this painting.
Human presence is often conveyed in Himid’s work, whether or not a figure is present, through the inclusion of trompe l’oeil stitching or the depiction of domestic objects. Here the human presence is implied through the patchwork of floral motifs, which resemble fabric swatches presented for the viewer to peruse. Many of Himid’s works feature conversations between people and in this painting she creates a dialogue with the viewer. These Are For You suggests a display of the artist’s archive of references. The title acts as an invitation for the viewer to observe and explore the flowers, not only their personal significance but also their historical and cultural connotations. MB
These Are For You, 2025 Acrylic on canvas 28 x 28 cm
Courtesy the artist, Hollybush Gardens, London and Greene Naftali, New York
1942-2001 Nerys Johnson
A honeysuckle and two rosehips are brought to life in magenta pink and fiery orange in Nerys Johnson’s small but animated watercolour painting. The plants are set against a monochrome black background, which intensifies their vibrancy. The description of the honeysuckle in the painting’s title as ‘looking right’ confers a sense of agency and vitality on the flower. Viewers of the painting are placed in a position of mimicking the subject’s own act of looking, creating an intimacy between the two.
Johnson made this work several months before she died at the age of 58. From early childhood the artist lived with rheumatoid arthritis, a condition that affected both her working method and subject matter. For much of her artistic life she based herself in a studio in the front room of her home in Durham. She painted while seated in a mechanised chair and used a long wooden pole as an aid. Cut flowers, easily available and endlessly varied, were an ideal subject for her improvised circumstances. She painted mostly with watercolour and gouache, mediums that can be revisited and adapted, allowing for periods of forced rest.
By the late 1990s, Johnson’s arthritis had evolved and she found it challenging to undertake even small tasks including preparing surfaces on which to paint. In the final two years of her life she enlisted her care assistants to tear fragments of paper on which she painted a sequence of brightly coloured watercolours, including this one. Each work is dated on the back with the specific day it was created, giving the series a diaristic quality. The brushstrokes in the paintings, both effortful and assured, are shaped by the specific choreography of Johnson’s body and movements – a record of the artist’s physical embodiment, as much as a representation of the flowers. NP Honeysuckle (looking right) with two rosehips, 2000 Watercolour on paper 19 x 10 cm
The Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College
Doron Langberg
Born 1985
Three blousy, showy pink hibiscus flowers take centre-stage in Doron Langberg’s painting. Positioned one on top of the other, they tumble down the canvas. The flowers are nestled within a mass of plump leaves and spindly stems, rendered in a palette of greens: forest green, emerald green, juniper green, apple green. While the top of the painting is dark and dense with colour, much of the lower section is left unpainted, giving the painting a spontaneous, provisional quality.
Langberg is best known for their figurative works which centre on queer sexuality and desire. Painted in vibrant tones, they depict male bodies engaged in intimate sexual acts. They connect these intense erotic scenes to their paintings of more mundane, everyday subject matter, saying: ‘For me, painting something like flowers, family members, friends hanging out, in addition to extremely explicit queer sexual imagery, humanises the more sexual parts of my work.’ In the same way that Langberg’s paintings of human figures have a sensual directness, their flowers are depicted up close, as though near enough to smell and touch.
Of equal importance to their subject matter is Langberg’s process of making and experience of materials. The artist creates many of their floral works from observation, placing their easel within verdant natural settings. The resulting paint marks – by turns bold, washy, delicate and scribbly – only just suggest the objects they describe. Langberg plays with the limits of our perception: the moment at which an abstract image takes recognisable form. When do smudges of pink paint become a hibiscus flower? When do scratches of green colour become a leaf? NP
Private collection, London
Hibiscus 1, 2022 Oil on linen
61 x 45.7 cm
Born 1988 Cassi Namoda
In Cassi Namoda’s vivid painting, the pale blue petals of a single flower completely fill the canvas and imaginatively extend beyond its edges. The flower’s centre, an earthen red from which delicate lines radiate outwards, is surrounded by inner petals painted in creamy white with touches of pink. A background of the same red visually connects the centre with the periphery.
The painting is one of several that celebrate the birth of Namoda’s young daughter, Arafah: ‘I made my first flower painting in the spring my daughter was born. That year the rains were long and drenching, and then she arrived almost ceremonially, in the first full sunlight of the season’s turning. I was deeply moved by the timing of her birth, how it mirrored the blossoming outside. It felt as though she had come with the flowers.’
Now living in Italy, Namoda was born in Mozambique, which remains a living presence for the artist: a place of memories, emotions, ideas, images and imagination, which all infuse her work. Her flower was inspired by a common variety that the artist recalls seeing as a child on her grandmother’s land. The vertical form of the canvas is suggestive of a portrait, while the subject, as if magnified, highlights the richly tactile surface of the painting, which was created over many days through the gradual application of layers of oil pigment.
For the artist, the image of the flower is a space for contemplation and may hold many meanings. The composition and process of making the painting reflect ‘the quiet formative moments that shape maternal identity, its rhythms and attentiveness’. The flower is not a detached, ornamental object in Namoda’s painting, but rather an expression of human experience. Namoda seeks to capture the feeling of a new world of motherhood and of the deepest love. AN Arafah Gaza’s Arrival, 2025 Oil on canvas
48.3 x 30.5 cm
Courtesy the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
Jennifer Packer
Born 1984
Jennifer Packer’s painting of a bunch of chrysanthemums has a feverish, fiery quality. Packer experiments with the capabilities of paint. Her rapid brushstrokes create the impression of dense crimson petals and tapering green-brown stems. Some lines are applied with wet, viscous paint, while others are faint and dry. In places, she has intervened with her own hand, leaving the trace of visible finger marks.
Packer began painting flowers in 2012, the year she graduated from art school. Her first flower painting, depicting a bouquet that she had been given by a friend, marked a departure from her usual practice of painting Black figures. She has said: ‘What I found was that I didn’t feel the need to make those paintings carry the weight of the question of what Blackness is.’ As the Black Lives Matter movement brought to light the killings of innocent Black men and women by the US police, Packer’s floral paintings took on a more urgent political meaning. She began to dedicate them to the victims of police brutality, seeing them as symbols of loss and mourning, like funerary bouquets.
Unlike many flower paintings that are situated within a domestic context, Packer’s chrysanthemums are set against a simple yellow background. The flowers extend upwards and outwards, filling the whole composition. With their expansiveness, they limit information about their surroundings. There is a sense of withholding. Rather than representing a specific bunch of flowers, Packer creates an emotional presence, an act of memorialisation. NP
Chrysanthemums, 2015 Oil on canvas
45.5 x 37.5 cm
The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, bought with the support of Kemal Has and Tala Cingillioglu, 2024
1927-2007 Bryan Pearce
A sprightly arrangement of red tulips and yellow daffodils springs and sways in a water jug. The heavy orange outlines of the flowers, window ledge and surrounding landscape give the painting a flattened, geometric quality, reducing the flowers to their simplest colours and forms. Each petal, leaf and stem has its place within the framework of the canvas.
Pearce was encouraged to paint by his mother, who was also an artist, for therapeutic purposes. He was born with Phenylketonuria, a rare condition affecting the development of the brain. In 1953 he began painting watercolours of still-life arrangements composed by his mother, as well as local scenes of St Ives where he lived all his life. He exhibited regularly at the Penwith Gallery and joined the Newlyn Society of Artists in 1959. His approach to painting was slow and methodical, not influenced by the work of others but instead focused on expressing his personal experience of the world.
St Ives had been an important place for Modernist artists of the previous generation, including Alfred Wallis, Christopher Wood, Winifred Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, with Wood and Nicholson depicting similar still lifes of flowers with an onward view of the Atlantic Ocean. For Pearce, the view of a vase of flowers, set against the Cornish coastline from the window, captures a sense of the artist’s contentment and joy in his surroundings; clear, effortless and beautiful. MB
Still Life, 1987 Oil on board
61 x 50.8 cm
Jenna Burlingham Gallery
1913-1989 William Scott
A warm golden hue surrounds a scattered assortment of yellow and orange flowers in William Scott’s Still Life–Flowers and Jug. The spindly stems and intertwined leaves cause disruption to the otherwise ordered composition. While the jug stands on the table, ready to be used, the scene awaits a human presence. Scott’s experimental rendering of flower painting does not depict a perfectly curated arrangement, but rather the state of disarray.
Created just after the Second World War, this painting exemplifies Scott’s distinctive method of simplifying objects and exploring their potential to reveal the nature of human relationships. The kitchen table is a recurring motif in Scott’s paintings from the 1940s, transforming in later works to a simple and abstract form. Scott used unremarkable everyday objects to experiment with colour and shape. His approach to representing the domestic was strongly influenced both by the reinvention of the still life genre in the early twentieth century, for example in the Cubist works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, as well as the flattened architectural spaces depicted in early European art.
The amorphous cloth or paper on the table in this painting suggests that the flowers have just been unwrapped and will soon be placed in the jug beside them. However, the way in which they lie scattered across the table also foreshadows their inevitable wilting and decay. This creates a sense of uncertainty. At what point during the lifespan of these flowers has this scene been captured? Will the flowers be arranged and presented in a beautiful bouquet, or simply discarded? MB
Still Life–Flowers and Jug, 1946 Oil on canvas
73 x 83 cm
Lent by Birmingham Museums Trust on behalf of Birmingham City Council
Vuillard
Emerging from a flurry of colour, an arrangement of wildflowers in a stoneware jug is the centrepiece of Édouard Vuillard’s Pot de grès et fleurs. The artist’s application of paint in small, energetic bursts remains consistent throughout the composition, resulting in an ambiguous sense of depth and space. However, with their vibrant white, yellow and green hues, the flowers stand out against the more muted lilac-grey tones of the background.
From the late 1880s, Vuillard was part of Les Nabis, an avant-garde art movement in Paris that pursued a simplified approach to composition, form and colour, as initiated by Post-Impressionist artists such as Paul Gauguin. However, from 1900 Vuillard adopted a form of naturalism that was more concerned with direct observation as a means of exploring interior light and space. Throughout his career, Vuillard’s work was characterised by a focus on the interior, often in the form of introspective scenes of everyday domestic life. Many of his paintings depicted the small Paris apartments that he shared with his mother. This composition has a spontaneous air, like a snapshot of a room, rather than a considered arrangement set up specifically for the painting.
In Pot de grès et fleurs, the blooms and the jug that contains them, the table they are perched on, the painting hung on the wall and the other items of domestic ephemera all appear to merge with one another and fade in and out of focus. When painting ordinary, familiar objects Vuillard often chose unusual angles and compositions. The central position of the flowers within the composition grounds the viewer in an otherwise hazy, disorientating space. MB
Pot de grès et fleurs, circa 1900-10
Oil on canvas
77.5 x 54 cm Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge
Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge 25 April – 6 September 2026
Curators
Andrew Nairne with Megan Breckell and Naomi Polonsky
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Sonita Alleyne OBE
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