Printable Vintage Art: Dahlias by Clara Maria Pope

Flowers, you who end in close affinity to the arrangers’ hands
(Hands of girls then, hands of girls now),
You who cover the garden table from end to end,
Grown weak, gently injured,

Waiting for water which revives you once more
From a death already commenced - and now
Again taken up between the opposing, sorting
Fingers and their feeling of you, and which can so well

Show you favour, give ease more than you had imagined,
As you recover yourselves in a jug,
Cooling slowly, and the ardour of the girls like confessions

Given up by you, seeping forth like muddy and tiresome sins
You committed by being plucked, - these are another tie between you,
So joined in alliance by both your blossomings.
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

Artwork is titled “Dahlias,” painted in 1818 by Clara Maria Pope, née Leigh (1767–1838). Daughter of artistic dilettante Jarred Leigh, Clara Maria Pope began her career as a model. Under the direction of her first husband, painter Francis Wheatley (1747–1801), she turned her attention to art and later in life became a successful painting instructor to young aristocratic ladies. Her talent as a botanical artist was recognized by Samuel Curtis (1779–1860), the publisher of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, who commissioned Pope to design illustrations for his two books, A Monograph on the Genus Camellia (1819) and The Beauties of Flora (1820). [Source: Dumbarton Oaks.]

My digitally enhanced version of the above painting can be downloaded as a high-res 11” x 14” @ 300 ppi JPEG without a watermark here.


Digitally enhanced reproductions of public domain fine art are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

In my garden, “Copper Boy” ball dahlias are still thriving despite the slightly cooler autumn we are experiencing. I was hoping that my “Tropical Lightning” rose would be flowering alongside these beauties but alas, no such luck. I plan to dig up the tubers once they go dormant and hope they will come back for me next year.

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