Vincent's early love of the natural world is mentioned by Jo van GoghBonger in her preface to the English edition of his letters: "Little Vincent had a great love for animals and flowers, and made all kinds of collections." He admired his mother's conventional flower paintings and, at an early age, copied hers or devised some of his own. Because of the religious environment in which he grew up--his father and grandfather were ministers--he saw nature as evidence of divine providence. And although he eventually rejected organized religion, his attitude toward nature remained reverent. Vincent's art replaced his religion and in the works of great artists he found similarly reverent attitudes toward nature. Indeed, the spiritual and symbolic bases of Northern Renaissance and Baroque art, the fervent response to nature by his favorite Romantic and Realist artists and writers all provide precedents. Some of van Gogh's flowers are simply visual hymns to the beauty and bounty of nature. Others which involve complex symbolism and the interplay of literary texts will be the subject of this discussion. There is opportunity here to discuss only a few, but I have selected the most important of Vincent's symbolic flowers.

It is worth remembering that van Gogh had tried and failed at several professions before deciding to become an artist. He worked for several years in the art dealership of Goupil in The Hague, London and Paris; and he had studied theology in Amsterdam and acted as a lay minister in England and in the coalfields of Belgium. This broad experience gives a depth and complexity to his earliest artistic efforts. This is clear in his drawing Sorrow, of April 1882, in which van Gogh uses symbols in a manner reminiscent of Netherlandish concealed or disguised symbolism, a tradition, according to Panofsky, which attempted to "reconcile a new naturalism with a thousand years of Christian tradition." Furthermore:

In early Flemish painting... the method of disguised symbolism was applied to each and every object, man-made and natural. It was employed as a general principle instead of only occasionally, just as was the case with the method of naturalism. In fact, these two methods were genuine correlates. The more that painters rejoiced in the discovery and reproduction of the visible world, the more intensely did they feel the need to saturate all its elements with meaning. Conversely, the harder they strove to express new subtleties and complexities of thought and imagination, the more eagerly did they explore new areas of reality.

Panofsky goes on to remark that the practice of disguised symbolism was perfected over time. Early artists, such as the Master of Flemalle, applied the system inconsistently, producing a curious mixture of open or obvious symbolism, disguised symbols and objects apparently devoid of meaning. But Jan van Eyck incorporated symbolically significant objects into convincingly natural settings, so that, as Panofsky says, they never step into the footlights. A legitimate heir to this tradition, van Gogh shared the double commitment to naturalism and spirituality. In his work there is a similar progress from a somewhat awkward and obvious to a more subtle use of symbols.

The obvious use of symbols is apparent in Sorrow, where he drew lilies of the valley and snowdrops, both harbingers of spring and symbols of the Virgin's innocence and purity. The lily of the valley is the specific attribute of the Madonna of the Immaculate Conception and further symbolizes the Advent of Christ. On the left edge is a flowering tree with tight buds. Finally, below the figure on the right is a nearly leafless ivy plant, an evergreen symbol of fidelity and eternal life. But even though van Gogh included these traditional symbolic references, the image is insistently modem in its style, and it does after all depict a pregnant nude, a subject seemingly inconsistent with images of the Virgin. . .

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