Lucian Freud's Potted Plants - Garden Museum

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Lucian Freud’s Potted Plants

By Giovanni Aloi, Guest Curator

In 1939, Lucian Freud painted a stack of clay pots. At first glance, this is a simple and charming image. On the right is a potted prickly pear (opuntia). On the left is a small silvery pachyphytum. From the perspective of a plant lover, there isn’t much to see… The pads of the prickly pear are cropped by the picture frame—much of the plant is left out. It is not what Freud wanted to focus on. The pachyphytum looks unassuming and fragile in its tiny clay pot. Unusual in composition and even stranger in subject, this is one of the most overlooked paintings by Lucian Freud. But this is one of Freud’s most meaningful works, especially if considered in the context of his long-lasting determination to paint plants in a way that no other artist had previously done. Potted plants have a long history and yet western art has had a complicated relationship with them.

It is known that clay and ceramic pots were widely used in India, Japan, China, and Korea over 3000 years ago, mostly to bring plants closer to houses and in courtyards rather than indoors. Terracotta plant pots have been found in the Minoan palace at Knossos on Crete. The Romans preferred to plant lemon trees in large marble pots. And throughout the Middle Ages, pots were used in convents to grow herbs as well as to keep life-saving medicinal plants close at hand.

Pots became instrumental to the rise of botanical gardens in Europe as well as to the growth in popularity of orangeries and eventually heated, glass greenhouses. As Europe’s colonialist ambitions expanded throughout the eighteenth century, trade in spices, tea, coffee, chocolate, sugar, and tobacco dramatically increased, as did the demand for live exotic plants. European aristocrats relished the opportunity to impress their friends and guests with lush greenhouses. Plants can be sought-after status symbols. The lure of the exotic has always appealed to kingly power. The oldest botanic gardens and menageries owned by Middle Eastern and Italian kings were a spectacle affirming their power over creation and by implication over people. Luis XIV owned over a thousand orange trees, each planted in large clay pots. The pots were transferred to heated greenhouses in winter.

A hand-coloured woodcut print of a 16th century gardener from 'The Herbal' or 'Krauterbuch' by Adam Lonicer (Lonitzer). Although Lonicer printed four editions of the Krauterbuch between 1557-77, the earliest edition of this image is cited as 1545 (Wellcome Library). However, this could be a 17th century copy, published in Frankfurt, c.1670.

For all their ubiquity among the rich, potted plants remained a bit of a rarity in art. The wonderful Dutch Golden Age, still-life paintings of Rachel Ruysch, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Maria van Oosterwijck, or Jan van Huysum and you won’t find a potted plant. Oftentimes, the bourgeoning spill of exuberantly lush flowers is cropped at the base, not to show the container. Sometimes a vase can be seen beneath the foliage, but never a pot. There are good reasons for this. Dutch Golden Age still-lives were highly symbolic. Artists depicted petals, tendrils, and leaves in minute detail to convey important Christian morals. Among others, daffodils—some of the earliest flowers to return every spring—represented rebirth and resurrection. Daisies stood for innocence, beauty, and love. Hyacinths symbolized peace of mind. While strawberry flowers spoke of chastity. The symbolic meaning of Dutch still-life paintings was somewhat Medieval in essence, it implied that God’s presence pervades every fibre of this world and that everything speaks of his master plan.

Still Life with Zimmerlinde, c.1950 Freud, Lucian (1922-2011) Credit: Private Collection. Photo © Christie's Images/© The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2022/Bridgeman Images.

Symbolic meanings were derived from sacred scriptures and biblical Apocrypha. Initially devised to educate protestant viewers of northern European countries, they subsequently became very fashionable with the mercantile and landowner classes in Italy, Spain, and France. The Protestant church saw religious images of sacred figures as idolatrous, spurring never-ending controversies over the use of icons in worship. Faced with the impossibility of painting sacred figures, artists found in the silence of plants a precious opportunity.

A vase filled with an elaborate and indeed impossible bunch of flowers could be arranged to exemplify our ability to find meaning in god’s creation and to also govern it. Flower arrangements exemplified man’s superiority over nature. Man brought harmony to the unruliness of the natural world. Potted plants didn’t fit the symbolic mold and as such, they were mostly ignored by artists. Potted plants only began to appear in modern art as religious symbolism fell out of fashion. Paul Cezanne, Van Gogh, Edward Manet, Berth Morisot, and Edvard Munch–it was at the turn of the 19th century, that the plant pot began to play a role in art.

Small Fern, 1967 (oil on canvas) Freud, Lucian (1922-2011) Private Collection © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images. This image is reproduced with kind permission of His Majesty The King

We often give plant pots for granted. They are everywhere a plant should not be. They are a quintessential feature in most homes and gardens as well as offices, and corporate lobbies. They are the only reason garden centers exist. Pots make plants do what they shouldn’t: move. They radically (pun intended) alter their vegetal nature—their stillness: a characteristic that in our minds more prominently distinguishes plants from us and other animals.

Pots also allow us to monetize plants—they are essential to the chain of production driving a business that in the US alone is worth roughly over 100 billion dollars—twice the value of the global art market. Pots can turn plants into objects. Through them we claim ownership. We move pots here and there according to our interior design taste and needs. Pots are practical. But they also make plants stand out as individuals, not the nameless multitude of a garden edge, the many blooms in a bunch of flowers, or the trees in a forest. A pot turns a plant into this plant, a single presence with its own identity and existence.

Throughout his career, Freud painted his potted plants often. While researching for my book, Lucian Freud Herbarium, I have identified at least twelve works by Freud in which potted plants are prominently portrayed. From Interior at Paddington (1951) which features a monumental potted yucca, to the smaller detail of the same plant in Balcony Still Life to Large Interior Paddington, (1968-69) capturing a sprawling potted zimmerlinde, or Self-Portrait, Reflection Listening (1967-68) and the delicate Small Fern (1967). Freud has proudly painted potted plants as a mark of individual distinction: it’s this plant—not any other plant, his paintings state. This, I explain in my exhibition catalog essay, is the one of the factors that led Freud to paint true plant portraits rather than pictures of plants as other artists had done before him.