 Hi everybody and welcome to today's Barnes Takeout. My name is Amy Gillette, I'm a researcher here at the Foundation. Now today we're going to head up to gallery number 15 to look at this exquisite flower piece by the French artist Philippe Parpette painted in the 1790s and before we zoom into that let's take a quick look at its context here at the Foundation. Let's get a little bit closer and as you may know Dr. Albert Barnes was responsible for the display that we still have today where he grouped both paintings, sculptures and decorative arts purely on formal terms and so we find our flower piece displayed immediately underneath a very similar flower piece that I think was produced by an artist who might have worked with Parpette maybe even one of his daughters. A post-Byzantine icon of the nativity that perhaps Barnes saw as sharing its incredibly rich and vibrant tones of scarlet and gold with areas of the Parpette painting like this tulip right here. I think we can maybe see the same color relationships with this painting from Korea and even the decorative objects like this hinge up here so it's shared in the same discourses where maybe Barnes saw in these scrolls up here an echo of the organic forms of the flowers and so with that being said let's zoom in a little and look more at our particular flower piece. So here we are the first thing I'd like to take a look at is the signature that you can see on the marble ledge of the table or counter and zoom in even closer. This is how we know the artist it says Parpette and then you might be able to see the numbers 179 and so we get the attribution to Philippe Parpette and the year 1790 something whatever whatever the number was is cut off over there. You can see the wood grain the veins of the marble and start to look at the different flowers and fruits that he has depicted for us on the one hand we can see these grapes up here that are so ripe that they're bursting green ones as well as purple. We can see some peaches starting to look at the vase with these let's just take a look at these drips of water running down its side and then all kinds of flowers of peony with water drops these little daffodils with the orange centers of rose helipads or maybe anemones over here I think that these are maybe white periwinkles lilacs I think a gladiolus and then this absolutely glorious let's take a close look here red and yellow striped tulip that a hundred years ago in Holland might have caused somebody to take out a second mortgage for this beautiful rarity among among flowers and so we have this flower piece that Parpette has given us that is just so palpably realistic that you almost feel I think like you're putting your face in a real bouquet of flowers right there except you know you think about it I think about it and I imagine walking around my own gorgeous neighborhood in Philadelphia and the daffodils that have been blossoming have faded but um the peonies are just coming out I know that the roses are yet to come grapes ripen in the autumn and so what we have here is really not reality so much as a form of hyper-reality with this artificial simultaneously going on with it and so in order to figure out a context let's look a little more at the artist and historical context to figure out what's going on now Philippe Parpette we know was an artist who entered the world porcelain factory in the year 1755 um his name is written down in factory records where whoever was the author wrote that Parpette knows how to use color well and draw a little but he promises to improve and has a sweet character quiet and hard working but after only two years the records say that Parpette disappeared suddenly without anyone knowing where he had gone but the artistic records say that he spent about 15 years working in Paris as an enamelor which probably explains a degree along with his porcelain career of exquisiteness in his botanical illustration but then he returned to um to the silver porcelain factory and became at that point one of their chief flower painters and so the improvement that the earlier recorder had foreseen it seems did in fact play out as we ourselves can see and being a chief flower painter at cyber meant that he produced a good number of stock compositions to be reproduced in porcelain and painting for the homes of the well to do working hand in hand with botanists and botanical illustrators so that brings us to the topic of botanical illustration which had a very long and kind of complicated history we know that it dated back at least to Roman times because we've got this Roman author named Pliny the Elder who was sort of skeptical about it writing on the one hand that um artists seem to like to introduce different colors um in a way that wasn't quite faithful to nature and he did note too he wrote that it's not enough for each plant to be painted at one period only of its life since it all cares its appearance with the fourfold changes of the year and so for Pliny the stakes clearly are high that a botanical specimen ought to be reproduced pretty exactly and this is a tradition that extended into Byzantine to medieval botanical illustration because as much as say people artists might abstract holy figures in art for different purposes if you're using a plant for medicine and most botanical illustration much of it I should say you'll find in medical treatises if you're going to be ingesting the plant for medicine you really want to know what you're looking at right but um on top of that tradition was actually the symbolic tradition and that was very common in medieval art and to get a sense of that we're going to take just a quick peek painting that we'll look at in a little while um with with another barn's take out a 15th century image of a Madonna and child in a garden and as much as this artist himself would have drawn on botanical illustration as perpetuated through the Middle Ages I just want to take a little look down at the corner here where we've got this fresh water stream populated by a couple different types of mollusks over there coral pearls along with things like strawberries and violets all of which would tap into some prayer or symbol about the Christ child or Virgin Mary and so this sort of symbolism did carry into let's go back now the most immediate precedents for flower pieces such as parpets which were produced in um in the Netherlands mostly in the 1600s where flowers like I mentioned um the the the tulip is being a popular rarity having just been brought in from the Levant into Northwestern Europe plus this um so there's this idea of conspicuous consumption um from that as well as the theme of Vanitas which means that everything in the world will ultimately pass away which was also articulated by the sort of bringing together unnaturally of all these different flowers that bloom and fade at different times but parpets images did take on further meaning from a renewed emphasis on botany so to get back to that let's think quickly that in the 18th and 19th century it's a period of time that people often called the Enlightenment and part of that as pertains to our particular flower piece was bringing botany under the umbrella of the empirical sciences and bringing those sciences into the homes of the middle and upper classes for example um botanical books by Carl Linnaeus were incredibly popular and widely read another factor that was rather new was global exploration and the introduction into Europe of um previously unknown to them um types of flora that they were eager to categorize to depict to classify scientifically um there is also this new aesthetic as well as moral tradition of the picturesque um that people that authors such as the famous writer Voltaire um cultivated and you could um you could be exposed to this by reading authors like Voltaire by wandering in your own pleasure garden by bringing these vault values on display in your home by bouquets that maybe now you've grown in a greenhouse or hot house or the displaying of a painting such as parpets and so in some parpets flower piece I would say exists between the earlier themes of um of the long tradition of botanical illustration um its perpetuation into medieval symbolism which by the way I should I should note to a degree um flowers did retain conventional symbolism such as the p&e for good fortune for for riches um for good luck in marriage arose for love for passion and so on um so it care it does carry on botanical illustration and symbolism reinvigorated for parpets own time by these new ideas about being empirical sciences um about the cultivation of plants as well as attendant virtues about this idea of the picturesque and with these it anticipated some other bouquets that we'll see in our collection like some gorgeous ones by Vincent van Gogh in which flowers take on interiority and emotion and so thank you so much for joining today that's it for today's barn to take out maybe well thank you I'm Tom Collins, newbauer family executive director of the barns foundation I hope you enjoyed barns take out subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art thanks for watching and for your support of the barns foundation