"A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption" - (James Thurber 1894 –1961)
< Back to Flowers and Trees

Flora, the Roman Goddess of Spring and Flowers

Matthew Moss' Flora has a stylistic affinity to the works of Florentine Mannerist painters of the sixteenth century, Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino and Domenico Beccafumi. These high-renaissance masters were greatly admired by English seventeenth-century collectors amongst whom Charles l. In Baroque seventeenth-century art, Flora was a popular subject and, in Holland, was treated on at least two occasions by Rembrandt van Rijn. One canvas, possibly, a portrait of his wife Saskia now in the Hermitage was executed in 1634 and another, of slightly smaller dimensions but of about the same period, in the London National Gallery.

Matthew began his version of the Roman Goddess Flora as a still-life painting of flowers and green and autumnal-brown leaves. Rather than add a landscape background of the hills and mountain villages as he had intended, the artist reversed the canvas 180° and in place of the terraced olive groves of Costarainera in Liguria he inserted the figure of a young Italian woman. To balance the floral composition in the top left of the painting he added, in the bottom right a still-life of fruit, that, in addition, acts as a frame to the enigmatic look of the girl intensified by the cluster of leaves that conceal her right eye.

Flowers and Trees are available for book illustrations, annual reports, paper and packaging, giftware, related products. You can license them in the following format: Original transparencies in 6 x 6 cm. (2¼ in.) format, high-resolution RGB drum scans on DVD or efficient and quick E-Mail or FTP upload.