The allure of irises lies not in their botany, but in their ability to express emotion
The striking iris, with its infinite palette of colours and habitats, has bloomed on the Great Sphinx of Giza, on Roman standards and in paintings from Leonardo da Vinci to Vincent van Gogh.
What a plant the iris is.
It is hugely adaptable and widespread, with some 300 species living in woodlands and marshes, meadows and arid near-deserts. There are bearded and beardless types, dwarf and standard sizes, hardy and delicate varieties and they sport an infinite palette of colours — iris in Latin means rainbow and is the root of ‘iridescent’. Virgil described this effect when he wrote in the Aeneid about the goddess Iris, the personified deity of the plants: ‘So Iris, glistening dew, comes skimming down from the sky on gilded wings, trailing showers of iridescence shimmering into the sun.’
As befits such a flower, irises have a rich symbolic heritage, too. All of human life is represented in those petals: purple irises have long been associated with wisdom, royalty and friendship; blue with hope and faith; white with purity; and yellow with passion. In 1469BC, the green-fingered King Thutmose III of Egypt cultivated them in his garden, and blue-gold flowers are shown in murals in the temples at Karnak, representing the life-giving flooding of the Nile; in Edo Japan (1603–1868), Samurai warriors drank sake flavoured with iris to ward off evil spirits; and, in 1933, the iris was adopted as the state flower of Tennessee in the USA.
The Greeks, of course, cherished the flowers, too, weaving them into wreaths for orators to ensure their silver-tongued words were polished. Roman legions preferred to persuade via the sword and draped their standards with irises to guarantee them safe passage through hostile lands. However, it was Christian usage that made irises a favourite motif for painters. Even in a religion rich in floral imagery, the flowers were special, their three petals invoking the Trinity, and their old, pagan role as symbols of Iris, a messenger of the gods, made them emblems of the Divine word — especially the Annunciation — brought to mankind, thus associating them with the Virgin Mary.
In 'Annunciation', 1480–89, by Hans Memling, a single blue iris stands tall alongside a white lily in contrast to the wilting Virgin, who is told by an angel that she will give birth to the son of God.
In about 1480–89, when the great Flemish artist Hans Memling painted the Annunciation, he showed a single blue iris in a jug next to a white lily (symbolising the Virgin’s purity) as an angel arrives in a room very similar to that in Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait and announces that she is to give birth to the son of God. Such is the enormity of the news that she has to be supported by two further attendant angels, but, although she wilts, the flowers stand tall.
Leonardo da Vinci also included irises in his Madonna of the Rocks (about 1483–86) in the Louvre, Paris, although in his later version, now in the National Gallery in London, he replaced the flowers with a Star of Bethlehem plant — a member of the lily family. Leonardo being Leonardo, a standard white lily would not do.
Albrecht Dürer revealed his own fascination with irises when, in about 1503, he painted a botanical watercolour of a blue specimen and about the same time a purple flower. These images fit with Dürer’s intense interest in Nature as an integral part of God’s creation. The flowers sit against plain backgrounds, shorn of associations, and transmit the sense of the artist’s wonder at their perfection. In the same year, he stared just as hard at a clump of turf (and the previous year at a young hare), picking out each blade of grass or strand of fur with exceptional precision. If God could fabricate organisms so small, little wonder he made Man such a complicated creature.
These drawings found further use when his workshop came to paint The Virgin and Child (‘The Madonna with the Iris’), in the first decade of the century, now in the National Gallery. The picture was made by various hands over a number of years and whoever painted it clearly knew the Master’s studio watercolours, as an almost identical plant is shown growing just behind the Virgin and her suckling child.
Claude Monet, although primarily thought of as the painter of waterlilies, was an iris lover, too. Indeed, at his garden at Giverny in France they were to the solid ground what the lilies were to his ponds.
Some four and a half centuries later, those same images were an inspiration to Elizabeth Blackadder (1931–2021), the Scottish watercolourist who specialised in softly lyrical and unadorned paintings of flowers. Irises dot her work, sometimes singly, sometimes in wind-blown clusters, the painter’s interest clearly in the ombré shading of the petals and pops of colour. Like Dürer, she painted them on a plain white background, happy to let the flowers take centre stage. There is no subliminal message to Blackadder’s blooms other than a simple — or perhaps not so simple — appreciation of beauty.
This spirit was alive in earlier painters, too. Claude Monet, although primarily thought of as the painter of waterlilies, was an iris lover, too. Indeed, at his garden at Giverny in France they were to the solid ground what the lilies were to his ponds. He was obsessive about his plants and at one point employed six gardeners (one whose job was simply to dust and wash his waterlilies). The flowers, with their long stems and burst of colour, were ideally suited to the fluid and loose handling of his later pictures and in some pictures he combined both plants, such as Irises and Waterlilies, one of some 20 paintings of the flowers he made from 1914–17. In others, he showed them in overstuffed beds, a mass of purple blooms contrasting with the green of the trees. When painting flowers, Monet rarely included a horizon — all his focus, and that of the viewer, being taken up by the plants, a trait even more pronounced when he painted them from above, such as the National Gallery’s Irises (1914–17).
The East Anglian painter Sir Cedric Morris was even more devoted to irises than Monet. He painted them numerous times in his many still lifes and fresh-air floral pictures. Like Monet, he used them in his own garden in Suffolk exactly as he used the paints on his palette — and for Morris, no painting of a bouquet or flowerbed was complete without an iris. He put them front and centre: any background, whether picturesque buildings or distant hills, was something for the eye to register after the flowers and not before.
Morris was also an accomplished plantsman, holding ‘Iris Days’ at which he would unveil the results of his propagation programme. Vita Sackville-West was a regular visitor and took plants back to her home at Sissinghurst in Kent to grow there. Many of the iris cultivars Morris developed at Benton End, the house in which he lived, ran a private art school (Lucian Freud was a pupil) and where he built a horticultural playground, have been propagated at the Beth Chatto Garden a few miles away near Colchester, Essex.
Following the Far East: the influence of Hokusai — such as his Grasshopper and Iris, from the late 1820s — can be seen in van Gogh’s work.
For Vincent van Gogh, by contrast, the allure of irises lay not in their botany, but in their ability to express emotion. Although sunflowers were the plant he chose as a personal motif (‘The sunflowers are mine’, he wrote), the irises that grew in the gardens of the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in France, where he was a patient from 1889–90, had as deep a meaning. He knew the plants from life, but also from the prints he collected, made by Japanese ukiyo-e artists who flourished between the 17th and 19th centuries. Both Hokusai and Hiroshige, the two leading artists of the school, created pictures of individual blooms that had a profound effect on van Gogh.
Shortly before his death, in a letter to his sister Wilhelmina, he recalled his last days at the asylum when, he said, he ‘worked with rage’. One of those late pictures, now in the Getty Museum in California, showed a stand of violet irises (now more blue than purple, because the red pigment he used in his mixture has faded) with a single white bloom among them. It is hard not to interpret that lone flower as a form of self-portrait — an outsider in the midst of a throng. The painting hid a secret, too, discovered by conservators: in the bottom left corner, they found pollen from an umbrella pine stuck in the paint, which conjures a poignant image of the artist at work in the asylum garden as his end approached.
The Japanese prints that enthused van Gogh helped spread a craze for irises as a decorative motif in late-19th- and early-20th-century art and interiors — a fad further encouraged by the pioneering Japanese colour photographer Kazumasa Ogawa, whose Some Japanese Flowers (1896), showing 38 varieties, including irises, was a revelation. Walter Crane, a significant figure in the Arts-and-Crafts Movement, included irises in his wallpaper designs, as did William Morris. American art glass designer Louis Comfort Tiffany used them in his table lamps, stained glass and vases — and in his own paintings, too. They were also a staple in the work of that other great name of Art Nouveau, Alphonse Mucha, whose posters did much to spread European high style to aspiring aesthetes around the globe.
Irises in art, as in botany, thrive in every climate and habitat
This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
