The Flower Book

A couple of weeks ago we went to see a temporary exhibition at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, Wirral. It was a collection of Drawings of Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite painter. I was really impressed with the collection of drawings and watercolours by Burne-Jones together with some of the paintings for which they were early studies.

One exhibit really caught my attention. In the final room there was a display case with a couple of pages from a manuscript of a book called “The Flower Book”. On the wall was a TV screen showing a series of still images of the pages of the original book. Burne-Jones compiled this book of 38 watercolours late in his life. It was published after his death in 1905 by his wife Georgina. The book was produced in a facsimile edition small print run of 300 copies. You can see all of the 38 watercolours he produced here. Each picture depicts an allegorical image related to the name of that flower. It is a beautiful piece of work.

That evening I hunted for information about the book. I found the website linked to above. I also discovered that Taschen, a German publisher, had produced a book with an introduction and the original material. It was out of print, but I found a second-hand copy in the USA for less than £10. I ordered it and waited. Two weeks later, and it arrived this morning!

It is stunning. I’m really enjoying looking through it. I didn’t buy it just to look at it. I have ideas to develop a book with my own words of reaction to each of the paintings. I want it to be fresh and open – so it won’t just be a set of poems that describe each watercolour. It’s important to take the original creative idea and spring it off into another direction completely.

I wrote last week about the power of collaboration. I guess you could call this a collaboration with an artist, even if he is no longer with us. I’m going to get started on this project this week. If I have material that is worth sharing here, I will post it. Ideas about how to present the final work are still forming. The original art works are up on Wikimedia Commons so presumably I could use the images alongside the work that I produce. As you can tell, lots of this is still forming in my head, but I am really looking forward to experimenting.