The term “handpicked” suggests a bouquet that has been chosen carefully, each flower selected for its colour, form or meaning and relation to the others. The curators of this new exhibition at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge have certainly achieved a complex yet complementary arrangement.
This small but rich exhibition was picked and approved with the help of The Kettle’s Yard Community Panel – a collective of Cambridge locals working alongside the gallery to help design, plan and curate exhibitions and creative projects.
The works are arranged chronologically starting with Henri Rousseau and ending with contemporary works by Chris Ofili and Lubaina Himid.
Rousseau’s Bouquet of Flowers (1910) is an array of real and imagined blooms with almost jungle-like depth. Rather than travelling abroad for inspiration, Rousseau relied on the Jardin des Plantes in Paris for the “exotic” plants taken from French colonies for his paintings.
Kettle’s Yard/Jo Underhill.
In contrast Himid offers the viewer a collection of blooms from peonies to palm leaves, arranged as a repeating pattern, redolent of east African Kanga cloth designs.
The reference to the cloth subtly recalls the colonial slave trade but also celebrates the richness and diversity brought by migration. The title, These Are for You – that phrase often used by visitors giving a bunch of flowers on arrival – can then be understood as a wry comment.
Juxtaposed with these complex global and historical themes are some more personal, intimate scenes. Vases of flowers are often depicted in interior domestic spaces. Relationships are shown or hinted at sometimes with an undercurrent of sorrow. Flowers, often harvested to give joy, to congratulate and decorate, once picked are doomed to wilt and decay.
Courtesy the artist, Hollybush Gardens, London and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Gavin Renshaw
Eric Ravilious’s Ironbridge Interior (1941) creates an atmosphere of calm, but also melancholy. The flowers and grasses in a jug are fresh from the hedgerow. On the wall of the sun-lit room is another painting loosely pinned of a different vase with more blousy but drooping blooms, which hints at the inevitable passing of time. This mise-en-abyme (picture within a picture), creates a hollow feeling of unease.
The painting is made more poignant in the knowledge that Ravilious, a war artist at the time, died a year later in an air crash. Nearby hangs a small painting by Tirzah Garwood, Ravilious’s wife. Springtime of Flight completed only nine years later, shortly before her death from cancer, depicts an intricately painted biplane flying above a floral landscape.
It movingly shows her love for Ravilious and her love of life when faced with her own mortality. It is an imaginary world that she perhaps took comfort and refuge in.
Jennifer Packer/The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.
There are many more stories to be found and pieced together in this exhibition. Some, like Jennifer Packer’s bloody Chrysanthemums (2015) return to a political subtext. This is one of the many floral paintings which Packer describes as “vessels of personal grief”. They pay tribute to people who have lost their lives through police brutality.
Packer’s work connects with Himid’s concerns. Their paintings are accompanied by Cassi Namoda’s more joyous work – a celebration of her homeland Mozambique and the birth of her son, Arafah Gaza’s Arrival (2025).
Others like Gluck’s Convolvulus (1940) reveal the sensual sometimes erotic inferences of flowers. Although a common weed, Gluck associated these flowers with their former lover the florist Constance Spry. In Gluck’s painting convolvulus or bindweed is made ornate and beautiful, imbued with sexual tension of winding limbs and lust.
Courtesy of the Artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels. Photographer: Thomas Merle
Of course, throughout the exhibition lies the changing landscape of artistic tastes and styles which mirror society and the times in which they were made. Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s precise almost architectural rendering of Fritillaria (1915), points to art nouveau as well as oncoming modernism. Whereas Rory McEwan’s enlarged minimally presented and closely observed Tulip (Helen Josephine) from 1975 blends minimal hyperrealism with botanical illustration.
At the other extreme hangs Howard Hodgkin’s small abstract Red Flowers (2011) painted with emotion-laden gestures in memory of his father.
Each artist has chosen their particular flowers to paint, exerting control over nature showing a particular fascination, atmosphere, idea that they want to impart though this choice. Every visitor can handpick and arrange their own narrative journey through this show, with the clear yet eclectic, aesthetic choices of the permanent collection as a subtle background influence.
Handpicked: Painting Flowers from 1900 to Today is at Kettle’s Yard until September 6 2026.
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