Bouquets of Art: A Flower Dictionary

  Published by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, this volume by Lauren Palmor, Associate Curator of American Art draws upon the rich history of the language of flowers in order to offer a new perspective through which to explore the permanent collection of the de Young and Legion of Honor. Featuring a sampling of floral imagery selected from across cultures, periods, and media, this guide builds on the methods of floriography as a means for navigating how the collection’s expansive array of objects intersects with the rich histories of floral symbolism and communication. Drawn from across the Fine Arts Museums’ holdings of American art, works on paper, costume and textile arts, European painting, and European decorative arts and sculpture, this selection of fifty floral objects presents the collection through a new lens, with accompanying texts that explore a rich variety of source material, including poetry, etymology, folklore, botany, popular music, biblical verse, mythology,