Mary Moser’s tulips

As I was looking for images of “broken” tulips in historic collections the other day, I happened across a series of watercolour studies in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which were the work of Mary Moser.

Moser was an interesting eighteenth-century artist, who, because she specialised in botanical subjects, has often been dismissed in the (misogynistic) historical record as a “flower painter,” yet who in her own time was definitely something of a pioneer. The daughter of an enterprising – some might say pushy – Swiss father, Moser’s artistic talents were encouraged at an early age, and by the time she was a teenager her work was garnering acclaim among fashionable London circles. In 1758, at the age of just 14, she exhibited a prize-winning ornamental design at the Society of Arts, and the following year was awarded a silver medal by the Society for a much-admired floral composition.

With a series of high-profile commissions from wealthy aristocratic patrons, Moser built a successful career for herself in 1760s London. In 1768 she was one of two women elected as founder members of the Royal Academy of Arts, the other being Angelica Kauffman, another interesting artist with Swiss roots. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women artists followed Moser and Kauffman’s pioneering lead, but not until 1936 was another to be elected to this notoriously exclusionary institution (Laura Knight).

Moser’s work was particularly popular with the British Royal Family: she taught painting and composition to the daughters of George III, and in 1792 received a prestigious commission to decorate a room of the new wing of Queen Charlotte’s Windsor residence, Frogmore House.

Queen Charlotte wanted this room to create the impression of an “arbour open to the skies” and Moser filled the space with flowers, painting garlands and bowers directly onto the ceiling and walls, as well as producing several individual canvases depicting floral subjects. For this work Moser was paid £900: then an enormous sum for an eighteenth-century commission, and the equivalent of around £120,000 in today’s money.

In the same year that Moser was celebrated in this portrait by George Romney, she also produced the series of watercolour tulip studies which I happened across in the V&A online collections.

These studies are interesting to me not only as beautiful examples of the work of an enterprising eighteenth-century artist, who in her day achieved considerable success, but also because of the way in which they capture a particular moment in the history of the tulip. While Moser was an artist whose career depended upon the enormous wealth and privilege of aristocratic and royal patrons, her tulip studies were produced during the period of what we might refer to as this flower’s democratisation.

In the seventeenth century, tulip cultivation was a hobby enjoyed only by the very rich: individual bulbs commanded extortionate prices, and, in the gardens of those wealthy enough to plant them, flowering tulips were displayed in the neat rows of formal parterres.

But by the 1770s, a new fashion had taken took hold of the British aristocracy and their increasingly elaborate landscape gardens: the Picturesque. Inspired by the classical landscapes of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorraine, and championed by designers like “Capability” Brown and Humphrey Repton, wealthy gardeners began to prize the distant, rambling prospect over myopic views of neat parterres.

As the quintessential parterre flower, the tulip was, by the latter decades of the eighteenth century, deeply unfashionable. But this decline in popularity among the wealthy meant that tulip bulbs also decreased in price, becoming much more accessible to the pockets of the keen amateur growers who the eighteenth century referred to as “florists.”

Many British “florists” were originally Huguenot migrants, who had brought a love of tulips with them from France and Belgium where their families had faced religious persecution. Members of the artisanal working-class, these tulip-growing refugees were also skilled stocking makers, textile printers, weavers.

Under the hands of the Huguenots, in the tiny back gardens of weavers’ cottages, beautiful tulips began to bloom.

In Edinburgh, a city whose thriving eighteenth-century culture was built around small clubs and societies, Huguenot weavers established an association in the 1770s for the showing of tulips and the sharing of tulip-growing lore. And, as the children and apprentices of these skilled weavers moved west across Scotland and south into Yorkshire and Lancashire during the subsequent industrialising decades, so tulips and tulip growing also followed in their wake. “The fabulous florists’ tulips developed through the late eighteenth and the whole of the nineteenth century were,” Anna Pavord writes, “bred and shown by artisans.”

The tulips illustrated in Moser’s studies are classic examples of what is now referred to as the “English florists” type, in the three classes under which they are still categorised, shown and judged “Rosen”, “Bybloemen”, and “Bizarre.”

Moser’s watercolours document an important moment in history of gardening, when the growing and showing of tulips was an activity increasingly enjoyed by working people, and gardening had become a rewarding hobby, accessible to all.