DELICATE CHALLENGES

Great Britain's, if not the world's, most elegant book of flower pictures is the Temple of Flora. First published in 1807, it brought fame and financial ruin to the man who conceived it. He was a well-heeled doctor named Robert Thornton, who spared no expense to make his book the most sumptuous of florilegia. He hired four obscure artists to paint the illustrations exactly as he wanted them, and then got some second-rate poets to apostrophize the plants in sticky verse. Now the London firm of William Collins has reissued the Temple (at $35 a copy) with a new text to accompany the original flower paintings; four plates from the book are reproduced on the opposite page.

Thornton, whose botany was not so sharp as his sense of the picturesque, insisted that his artists give each flower a romantically appropriate setting: Dutch meadows for the tulips, mountain heights for the kalmia, a forbidding coast for the American cowslip, a gothic midnight for the night-blowing cereus. If the results have more period charm than truth-to-nature, it is partly because flowers are among the most difficult challenges a painter can pick. Flowers are delicate as eyelids, complex as blood vessels, vital as fire, and their colors make paint look muddy by comparison. Yet artists--an ambitious and often a vain lot--keep trying each summer to paint them.

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