Talking of burdock plants (see my last post), a book I have recently discovered and loved reading is Weeds by Richard Mabey. Described on the dust jacket as ‘the first ever cultural history of weeds’, it has a whole chapter on burdock – which reveals famous works of art with burdock in (who’d have known!) – some of that chapter I thought I would share here…
Burdock on Northcote Nature Reserve last September
Mabey references famous works of art with burdock in them, from as early as the seventeenth century. In Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with Dancing Figures it is painted realistically in the bottom right hand corner, recognisable by its large drooping leaves, but no flowering spikes, and similarly at the bottom of Landscape with Rustic Dance. Burdock has a strong sculptural quality and in Landscape with Narcissus and Echo the plant echoes Narcissus’s splayed legs and arms.
Mabey also reveals burdock in works by Thomas Gainsborough and George Stubbs. Burdock appears, for example, in The Cottage Door, by Gainsborough, but also in a beautiful study of burdock leaves by Gainsborough, held at the British Museum https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1910-0212-256
Mabey puts forward the idea that “what burdock suggests in these pieces is that beauty can reside in the uneven and the asymmetrical – in the idea of weediness in fact”. I so agree!
In the eighteenth century, in Horse Attacked by a Lion by George Stubbs, (on display at Tate Britain) the plant plays a front and forward role, echoing the horse’s agonised head. But interestingly, as Mabey points out, the plant is beginning to die, with patches of brown rust, pointing to the idea of “elegance under pressure – what you might call grace”.
There is so much more in this chapter that I could recall here but I will just draw attention to one other artist mentioned, following through on the idea of “elegance in the business of living and ageing” – in 2008, the distinguished American photographer Janet Malcolm produced a series of 28 close-up photographs of burdock leaves in different states of living and dying, preferring the flawed leaves to fresh new ones – leaves which have lived life. Her portraits give these “uncelebrated leaves” a kind of grace and nobility.
Mabey’s book on Weeds is one of those books that has had a real resonance for me and continues to inform my work.
All quotes above are from the chapter, Burdock, in Weeds by Richard Mabey.
