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Flower power: symbols of romance and revolution

2 May 2020

9:00 AM

2 May 2020

9:00 AM

Blooming Flowers: A Seasonal History of Plants and People Kasia Boddy

Yale, pp.250, 14.99

Critics have argued over the meaning of the great golden flower head to which Van Dyck points in his ‘Self-Portrait with a Sunflower’. It probably symbolises the radiant majesty of the painter’s patron, Charles I, but for Van Gogh the sunflower ‘embodied and shouted out yellow, the colour of light, warmth and happiness’.

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