Differences in definition: Botanical illustration, botanical art and floral art

What genre does a painting of plants or flowers belong to?
Some people might call any realistic depiction of vegetation a botanical illustration.
Female artists who intrepidly search the wilds for rare plant specimens to document in paint have been denigrated with the term “flower painter.”

There are three main categories of art that use plants as their subject matter:

• Botanical illustration
• Botanical art
• Flower painting or floral art

Botanical illustration is the most technical discipline. A botanical illustrator emphasizes information and accuracy. The purpose of a botanical illustration is the documentation of the anatomical and functional aspects of the plant throughout its life cycle. The commissioning scientist or institute directs the work of the illustrator closely, and has a list of specifications and details that must be represented in the finished piece. Today’s botanical illustrators often use Photoshop, Illustrator, and digitally interactive media to create their depictions of the vegetable kingdom.

Botanical Gardens Conservation International defines botanical illustration in this way:

The main goal of botanical illustration is not art, but scientific accuracy. It must portray a plant with the precision and level of detail for it to be recognized and distinguished from another species.

The need for exactness differentiates botanical illustration from more general flower painting. Many great artists, from the seventeenth-century Dutch masters to the French Impressionists, such as Monet and Renoir, to modernists like Georgia O’Keeffe, portrayed flowers; but since their goal was aesthetic, accuracy was not always necessary or intended. In the hands of a talented botanical artist, however, the illustration goes beyond its scientific requirements.

This page from my sketchbook is a good example of botanical art. While realistic, not every detail of the whole plant is included, and the vagaries of the individual leaf are portrayed.

Contemporary botanical artists seek to balance the demands of accurate depiction with the artistic requirements of a well-composed and interesting painting. Botanical art usually relies on old-fashioned, analog media like watercolor and stippled ink. Accuracy is still of utmost importance, but revealing every detail of the plant’s life cycle is not a requirement. Today’s botanical art is often created at a very large scale, or uses modernist compositional techniques like dynamic image cropping. Unlike a botanical illustrator, who seeks to create a representation of the archetypal member of a species, a botanical artist may choose to paint a plant “portrait,” depicting the scars and asymmetry of an individual specimen.

Floral art is the least onerous genre of the three in its technical demands. Plants can be the subject of a classical still-life; color accuracy can be sacrificed for a more harmonious composition; dramatic brushwork can obscure anatomical detail. Floral art can be extremely realistic, or freely expressionistic as the artist prefers. The final image needs to be true to its own internal structure first and correspondence to physical reality or a specific actual plant can be relegated to a secondary role.

Several years ago, Germaine Greer offered an impassioned and provocative defense of flower painting in preference to botanical art:

Flowers have movement and habit. We recognise a wildflower in the distance not because we can count the number of anthers, but because of the way it dances. Its stem has pliability or stiffness as well as colour and dimension. The difference between botanical art and flower-painting is the difference between the illustration in your field guide and the bird on the wing.

The Central Virginia Botanical Artists’ website offers a useful explanation of the differences between the three disciplines.