Forget Lucian Freud's nudes – he was a magnificent painter of plants

Lucian Freud once described one of his plant paintings as “lots of little portraits of leaves”. Two Plants took him three years to complete and it apparently drove him “around the bend”. As he recalled: “I felt like I was composing an enormous symphony, and since I’m completely unmusical, the difficulties were many. And when I took one tiny leaf and changed it, it affected all other areas of it, and so on.”

These thoughts, and a few more about how he hoped the painting would convey a “really biological feeling of things growing and fading”, are pretty much all Freud said about the plants in his work. The endless fascination of critics with his fleshy, abrasive-looking models kept the spotlight away from his botanical subjects. In a rare glimmer of interest, art historian Lawrence Gowing once remarked that the yucca tree Freud painted in Interior at Paddington (1951) was “one of the most memorable potted plants in the history of modern art” – though he never said why.

Freud’s roughly 100 paintings, etchings and drawings of plants remain conspicuously overlooked. And that has nothing to do with the quality of the art – from the linear minimalism of early works on paper and the meticulous realism of his mid-career paintings to the near-expressionist verve of the last few canvases of his Notting Hill garden, Freud captured the elusive essence of plants like no other. So why are these paintings rarely exhibited and discussed?

The fraught relationship with plants in art is rooted in the past. Scholars of 16th-century Italian academies were the first to rank subjects in art. A hundred years later, André Félibien, court historian to Louis XIV, set the rule in stone when he declared: “He who produces perfect landscapes is above another who only produces fruit, flowers or seashells. He who paints living animals is more estimable than those who only represent dead things without movement, and since man is the most perfect work of God on the Earth, it is also certain that he who becomes an imitator of God in representing human figures, is much more excellent than all the others.”

Félibien’s words profoundly changed the course of western painting. At the time, the study of the nude, essential to the training for history and religious painting, was forbidden to aspiring female artists. This enormously limited their creative potential and systematically excluded them from the making of what, back then, went by the name of great art.

Faced with not being able to enter prestigious competitions such as the Prix de Rome, or win important scholarships, women turned to the “lower” ranks of art. Despite the highly specialised skill that painting plants required, images of flowers and fruits were more affordable and appealed to the newly wealthy mercantile class. Our inability to take paintings of plants seriously owes much to this patriarchal thread entangled in gender and social biases.

Luckily, the best modern artists knew how to disrespect classical rules. From impressionism and surrealism to pop art, plants have quietly been at the forefront of the most important artistic revolutions. Indeed, the root of the problem has been with the writers of art, who have unwittingly subscribed to the old rules. So, while paintings of plants are not necessarily rare in modern and contemporary art, their importance has been grossly diminished by critics, curators, and art historians. And they are not alone. The history of art has not been the only discipline to marginalise the natural world. Across literature, philosophy, theatre and more, defining our humanity through the arts has come at the cost of pushing plants and animals to the side. For centuries we have posed as sole protagonists on the historical stage and when, through art, we have turned to plants, all we could ever see was ourselves.

Art institutions are now rushing to acknowledge the threat of the climate crisis, but in truth, the writing has been on the wall – or shall we say on the canvas – for the past 500 years. Our lack of regard for plants and animals in art is indicative of our lack of appreciation for nature itself. The current climate emergency is surely linked to this longstanding cultural attitude.

The other problem with plants and western art is symbolism. During the Renaissance, plants were turned into the trustworthy keyholders of visual narratives. Leaves and petals anchored essential virtues and admonished the faithful to fear the perils of evil. So, cherries, red carnations and poppies evoked blood in Christ’s passion, and the whiteness of citrus blossoms, lilies and jasmine incarnated the purity of the Virgin. Thereafter, the overindulgent flower compositions of the Dutch golden age added to the glossary, as did the hyper-detailed paintings of the pre-Raphaelites, who fondly drew from the wave of floriography, the interest for the language of flowers that swept Victorian England. Seeing symbols wherever flowers bloom is undeniably poetic, but symbolism replaces one thing for another and invites us to see ourselves in the subject rather than see the subject itself.

Van Gogh, Monet and Georgia O’Keeffe have painted flowers that bypassed obvious symbolic meanings. However, Van Gogh’s sunflowers and other floral subjects are revolutionary only on the surface. Beneath the thick brushwork, their roots are firmly planted in the tradition of Dutch still-life painting – they are simply beautiful, albeit modern, reminders of death. Monet’s waterlilies are transfigured landscapes of spiritual longing in which the artist’s obsession with reflections on water and atmospheric effects could be explored to the full. And O’Keeffe’s explicit closeups of flowers are far too carnal to be truly vegetal.

In contrast, the originality of Freud’s paintings of plants is directly linked to his rejection of classical symbolism – he knew how it could blind us. Unabashedly stripping off symbolic layers, Freud uncovered a raw essence so it could rise to the surface of his canvases in the most unforgiving and unnerving of ways. This quality pervades his nudes and portraits of plants in equal measure. Both are laid bare in the truth of their existence, voided of messages and meaning they cannot naturally own.

Freud wasn’t interested in idealisation, either; he composed or synthesised but never attempted to lift his subject out of life’s gutter. As a result, his painted plants couldn’t be more distant from the tradition of still-life painting. Not for him the exotic cultivars or the baroque pyrotechnics of the Dutch golden age: Freud preferred weeds and straggly potted plants – ones he encountered and lived with. Every single portrait of a plant he made feels like a slap in the face to still-life painting and botanical illustration. Freud’s plants are irremediably engulfed in their laconic character and imperturbable demeanour. Their awkward realism and enigmatic presence are a ground-breaking attempt by a modern painter to allow plants to shine with an unsettling sense of individuality.

At times, as in the case of the lush pandanus dominating the canvas of Interior With Plants, Reflection Listening (1967-68), plants are silent witnesses to the artist’s personal life. Is the imposing pandanus in Freud’s studio akin to a wise old friend who has seen it all but knows better than to speak?

In other works, plants seem to hold the key to impenetrable enigmas, such as the one he staged for Still-Life With Aloe (1949), in which, on a white table, an uprooted variegate aloe lies next to a fish – one body echoing the shape of the other, both equally silent, out of their elements. This surrealist-inspired juxtaposition couldn’t be more open to interpretation. Is Freud inviting an aesthetic comparison, pointing at an existentialist conundrum, or pondering on vulnerability?

And there’s also the recurring zimmerlinde, a bushy, broad-leaved plant brought to England by Freud’s famous grandfather, Sigmund. It’s the most painted plant by the artist, and has no symbolic meaning in the history of art but has become an unofficial Freud family emblem. Its branches stretch, somewhat oppressively, over the head of Lucian Freud’s first wife, Kitty Garman, in a 1948 pastel on paper, and tower over the utterly vulnerable image of Ib, the artist’s rebellious daughter, then aged seven.

On canvas, the stillness and silence of Freud’s plants are perfectly wed to the stillness and silence of painting. The artist was acutely aware of the affinity between his aesthetic language and the enigmatic essence of plants he attempted to capture. Painting is at its bravest when it confronts bare life, reaching where language begins to crumble and only brushstrokes dare to speak. In no other subject painted by Freud is this perfect alignment more pronounced than in his plants.

• Lucian Freud Herbarium by Giovanni Aloi is published by Prestel.