| European Watercolors — Walter Hood Fitch - A Study of Roses and Apples |
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Walter Hood Fitch - A Study of Roses and Apples |
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Medium: Gouache and watercolor Dimensions: 17 3/4 x 14 inches Botanical painters find inspiration in many locations and while Redouté was to paint the flowers in the gardens at Malmaison, others sought out the plants of the humble kitchen garden. Karel van Mander noted that the famous Dutch painter, Abraham Bloemaert, made a large number of studies "from life, handling his pen with ease and touching up his drawings with greenish tones that produced an excellent effect." These drawings were eventually published as the Plants of the Kitchen Garden. The popularity of gardening and of cultivating fruit trees, which had begun at the end of the sixteenth-century, led to the publication of an enormous number of scientific books and gardening manuals during the following centuries. Artists were employed to illustrate these texts and responded by making studies of flowers, trees and their produce. Walter Fitch Hood was just such an artist and he produced countless images for Curtis’s Botanical Magazine between 1834 and 1877. Indeed, he became the sole artist to produce works for the magazine and in all 2,700 of his images were published. This handsome study of roses and apples encapsulates the beauty and the bounty of the kitchen garden. The apple is shown in both its whole and dissected state, giving the work a scientific quality as well as providing an aesthetically harmonious grouping. The voluptuous roses, in various shades of pink, have aways been a popular flower and were typical plants of the kitchen garden. |
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