Iris and Asphodel

Christiana Jane Herringham (1852-1929)

c.1900

Tempera and watercolour on board

Royal Holloway, University of London

Presented to Bedford College by Sir Wilmot Herringham, before its amalgamation with Royal Holloway, and on display at the Christiana Herringham exhibition of 2019. [See commentary below]

Photograph and text by Jacqueline Banerjee. The photograph is reproduced here by kind permission of Royal Holloway. [Click on the image to enlarge it]

Herringham loved painting flowers, and produced many such paintings during her career. At the exhibition of her work in Royal Holloway, the gallery label explained that she first started to exhibit them as a student in the 1870s, when she showed two of them at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition. They are often, as here, large in scale, so as to capture the flowers in their actual size. They are also remarkable for their close detail and harmony of colour. Taking up the gallery's suggestion about Ruskin's influence on these paintings, we might recall that he particularly loved the white iris, Iris Florentina, painting a minutely precise watercolour of one in the 1870s. However, Herringham's approach to it is rather different. If anything, its flowers are less closely observed than those of the starry asphodels, opening along tall stems, the unopened buds making reddish points among them. The yellow flowers make a pleasing contrast, as do the yellowish-green of the ferny leaves, the deep purplish shadow in the right foreground, and the lighter purplish haze above. What Herringham has captured is the blousy look of the iris, the show it makes among its companions. Her interest seems to be in the plentifulness of nature, as well as in the perfection of the individual plant. Notice the six butterflies benefitting from this abundance.

Bibliography

"Fleur-de-Lys ('Iris Florentina'), John Ruskin." Ashmolean. Web. 6 November 2019.

Gallery label at the "Christiana Herringham: Artist, Campaigner, Collector" exhibition at Royal Holloway, University of London, 14 January – 8 March 2019.

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Created 6 November 2019