Bouquet dans la peinture by Joséphine le Foll

Published January 21, 2025

This book, written by Joséphine le Foll, is the first general history of the figure of the flower vase in art, and its corollary, the bouquet. Published in 2023 on the occasion of the exhibition Flower Power at the Musée Giverny, it has 208 richly illustrated pages. Designer Félix Müller used Selva Script for the cover and titles, accompanied by A2 Antwerp.

The publisher, Citadelle & Mazenod, describes the book as follows (translated):

Although nothing is more commonplace these days than flowers in a vase, this practice has long remained unknown in the West. Although the first objects specifically designed and made to contain a bouquet date from the end of the 16th century, the image of the vase filled with cut flowers is much older. It was invented in the 13th century, in a sacred context, to represent the unrepresentable incarnation of the Son of God in the body of a young virgin. The conceptual and symbolic power of this “flowery container” enabled it to be taken up again in the secular sphere, in portraits and still lifes in particular, adapting its meaning without losing the original value of its theological content. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was at a time when the practice of putting cut flowers in a vase was beginning to be better documented - in other words, during the Age of Enlightenment, when religious sentiment was on the wane - that a painter like Chardin set about painting a bouquet as he saw it, rather than with the “eyes of the mind”. But it was not until the Impressionists and the development of horticulture that artists began to reproduce on canvas the “real” bouquet placed in front of their easel. Used again and again from the 17th century until the third millennium, the motif reveals the power of an attraction that cannot be justified by the traditional, moralistic interpretation of the bouquet as a symbol of vanity and the ephemeral nature of existence. Invented to represent the mystery of gestation, the image of the vase of flowers has become a metaphor for inner, fertile, living creativity.

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