John Mitchell Fine Paintings gallery was hung with a selection of flower and still-life paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries, both in oils and in watercolour, bringing together examples of French and British flower painting from this enduring genre.
Appearing in our advertisement in the 24th May edition of Country Life magazine, the highlight was Antoine Berjon’s Basket of Roses and a Hydrangea.
This exceptionally rare French flower painting is one of only about twenty known oil paintings by this supremely gifted but elusive master from Lyons in south-eastern France. It was last with our firm a generation ago, and the intervening decades have only served to underline to connoisseurs and curators the scarcity and ‘cult status’ of Berjon’s work.
Also on view were three botanical watercolours by the great Pierre-Joseph Redouté, and a posy of flowers by one of his many lady pupils, Eulalie de Bridieu. Meanwhile Mary Moser’s delicate canvas of roses reminds us how comparatively obscure the art of flower painting in late eighteenth-century Britain remained.
The display brought together these and other examples of 18th and 19th century flower painting, a genre which is so much a part of John Mitchell Fine Paintings’ ninety-two year history. The exquisite Berjon alone was worth a visit!