if we opened me up, we'd find beaches

Flora and Sylva

Today we present illustrations from Volume One of the revised edition of Paxton’s Flower Garden by John Lindley and Sir Joseph Paxton, revised by Thomas Baines and published by Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co. in London in 1882. The color illustrations we are featuring today are by Walter Hood Fitch, a prolific botanical illustrator who also produced chromolithographs for Curtis’s Botanical Magazine.

Paxton’s Flower Garden was issued in monthly parts from 1882-1884, which became three volumes. It was written by two eminent British botanists. John Lindley (1799-1865) is considered by many as the “father of orchidology.” In his early years he served as an assistant to Sir Joseph Banks in his library and herbarium, and later was appointed assistant secretary to the Royal Horticultural Society. He was also elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London and in 1829 he was appointed professor of botany in the newly founded University of London. Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-1865) was a British gardener, designer, writer, Member of Parliament, and creator of one of most famous buildings of Victoria’s reign, The Crystal Palace, a cast-iron and glass structure originally built in Hyde Park, London, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851.

The preface states the original purpose of Paxton’s Flower Garden was “To supply, in monthly parts, as full an account of all the new and remarkable plants introduced into cultivation as is necessary to the horticulturist; the history of such plants being sought in botanical works published on the continent; to which English cultivators have little access, as well as in those of our own country, and in the gardens or herbaria from which they are derived.” 

View more posts from Paxton’s Flower Garden.

View more posts from our Flora and Sylva series.

Portrait of a Child, 1882, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Nude, 1917, Amedeo Modigliani

Windmill in the Gein, 1907, Piet Mondrian

In 1998 Portuguese born artist Paula Rego created a series of work entitled Untitled.The Abortion Pastels.  Rego created her work in response to a referendum to legalise abortion in Portugal, which was very narrowly defeated. Each canvas depicted the image of a woman undergoing an unsafe abortion.

Rego was born in Portugal in 1935, into what she describes as a repressive, middle-class Portuguese life in which women were highly encouraged to do nothing, while working-class women were forced to do everything. The painter recalls girlhood as a time of learning obedience to men, in addition to secretive and confused messages about puberty, sexual abstention and female propriety.  Then fascist Portugal was described by her father as a ‘killer society for women’.

Dejanira (Autumn) by Gustave Moreau 

c. 1872-1873

oil on panel