Beauty has always been the prime subject of paintings, so it is no wonder that the marvelous, natural, diverse subject of flowers often appears repeatedly in paintings. These painted flowers, however, often serve more purpose than a decorative display. Flowers can be extremely symbolic of various concepts and attribute different meanings to a painting depending on a variety of factors. There’s more to a flower, it seems, than just its petals!

Over hundreds of years of painting practices, flowers have symbolized many different things. Most often, flowers are used to represent life and nature, since they are one of the most beautiful aspects of the natural world. Painters will often choose flowers as a subject to represent the peace, beauty and simplicity of the natural world. Flowers also symbolize fertility. Lilies, for example, if found in a painting, could symbolize fertility; however, lilies have also been heavily associated with symbolizing less favorable things, such as death and loss (this flower and symbol was prominent in some Claude Monet paintings). Along with fertility, flowers have often been used as a symbol of sex. Salvador Dali, for example, used roses in some of his paintings to represent female sexuality. Flowers have also been used to symbolize innocence, childhood, love, luck, prosperity, lust, happiness, sorrow and life itself.

Individual types of flowers can symbolize completely independent concepts as well. For example, a painting that includes an iris can be hinting at death or sorrow, as this flower is often associated with these two things. On the other hand, Asian art often uses a lotus flower to symbolize renewal, rebirth or creation. Individual flowers hold individual meanings and can affect the entire meaning of a painting. The specificity of concepts or meanings of a flower in a painting can be startling. In medieval Christian art, for example, the portrayal of a violet was meant to symbolize the humility and grace of the Virgin Mary. The same flower may even hold multiple meanings, as in the case of the rose. A single rose can have a dozen different meanings, depending on the rose’s color, the subject of the painting, the era it was painted and the style it was painted in.

Most of the time, flowers either represented birth (as seen in many Asian and Renaissance paintings) or death (in medieval and more modern art forms). However, flowers have long symbolized an entire spectrum of concepts and ideas, both light and dark. This versatile type of plant proves just as versatile within paintings, and has long been used as a key symbol for the striving artist.