Find botanical art for sale from the best contemporary artists practising today. Whether you’re just starting up an art collection or you’re a seasoned pro, we can help you buy or rent botanical art and build on your collection today. Explore our collection, including Botanical Collage and Botanical Photography.
For a fresh take on botanical painting, take a look at the work of Simon M Smith, a British artist working with mixed media. Smith’s paintings draw on a variety of different materials, including dress patterns and torn paper, to create layered pieces that showcase the beauty of flowers. The soft, quiet colour palates give his work a sophisticated feel that has earned him great success and popularity.
If it’s botanical photography that you’re looking for, then Robert Pereira Hind is a great choice. His mixed media series ‘Out of Eden’ has a wonderfully simple yet effective look, created from photographic ink pigment printed onto a gilded wooden background. The series is an examination of the natural world, with many of the photographs featuring trees and flowers, making them perfect additions to a collection of botanical art.
A brief history of botanical art
Tulips blooming into life, the twisted bark of an oak tree, the delicate petals of a rose, all these subject matters come under the category of botanical art, which can be simply summarised as artwork that depicts some form of plant life. Whether as a scientific study of the plant’s structure or a sheer celebration of its beauty, botanical artwork is at once inspiring and calming, inviting the viewer to consider their relationship to nature.
One of the most notable and widespread forms of botanical art is that of natural history illustrations. These botanical illustrations had their heyday between 1750 and 1850, a period that is often referred to as the ‘golden century’ in the world of natural history illustration. Created in order to objectively study and spread awareness of a plant’s form and function, these illustrations are undeniably beautiful in their attention to detail and precision. Botanical artists in this period were highly respected for their work, with illustrators such as Franz and Ferdinand Bauer working directly for the King to record as many examples of the world’s flora as possible.
Not all botanical art comes in the form of botanical illustrations, however. One of the most important figures in 20th century art is Georgia O’Keeffe, an American artist whose paintings of flowers attracted praise and controversy in equal measure. O’Keeffe often painted closeups or the inside of flowers, obscuring their identity and creating an abstracted piece that celebrates the beauty of natural forms. She was considered by many as vulgar due to her paintings’ resemblance to female genitalia, a claim that she repeatedly denied and that was likely due to a rise in Freudian thinking that was eager to uncover sexual undertones in all areas of society.
