"Despite the trouble they cause, weeds have always had apologists seeking to explain their existence on the earth and find some moral teaching in their lifestyle. For the eighteenth-century school of 'physic-theology' (a prototype of the modern theory of Intelligent Design), for example, they had two kinds of usefulness. First, as demonstrations of God's canniness as a botanical engineer; second, as salutary scourges of human arrogance. Painters, too, found in some weeds a kind of epitome of natural dignity. From the mid-seventeenth century, Shakespeare's despised 'hardocks', the expansive, floppy-leaved, adhesive- fruited burdock, began to feature in landscape paintings. It's never centre stage, nor obviously significant. But it lurks in the margins of a multitude of pictures - felted, foppish, sometimes hard to make out, as if it were some kind of emblem whose meaning the viewer had to decipher. It was the first weed to be credited with some kind of artistic - or architectural - beauty.
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"It haunts woodland clearings (probably its native home, roadsides, field edges and the waste patches round gardens and derelict buildings. One later artist remarked that the leaves 'have a messy droopingness - they seem to be crawling along the ground'.
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| Common burdock |
"Images of burdock first crop up in seventeenth century Dutch painting, indistinct in the corners of a few landscapes by Jan Wynants and Jacob van Ruisdael. In the work of Claude Lorrain, widely regarded as the father of European landscape painting, it becomes more obvious. A modest tuft, its leaves mantling the rocks, sits in the bottom right -hand corner of Landscape with Dancing Figures (1648). Behind it, young people picnic and jig with tambourines. In the more wistfully shaded Landscape with Rustic Dance (1640 - 41) the grey -green fronds have moved to the bottom left-hand corner. In Claude's best known painting, Landscape with Narcissus and Echo, (1645), they are still at the bottom of the painting, but more central, and the arch of the leaves echoes Narcissus's splayed legs and arms as he gazes down at his reflection in the water. In Landscape with David and the Three Heroes (1658), which features a lot of men with spears, the burdock (still perched on the bottom edge of the scene) is at last allowed to show a flowering spike.
"... there are plenty of flowers and token foliage ... but burdock is the only one that is drawn with realism, and is instantly recognisable.
"Thomas Gainsborough borrowed much from Claude, including burdock, and a token tuft occupies a typically Claudean position in the bottom right-hand corner of The Cottage Door (1780). It acts as an ornamental base for the dead and gloomy tree trunk which frames the mother and children...
Gainsborough made a number of studies of burdock:
"The leaves, outlined with a few bold strokes in black charcoal, are set against a gnarled tree trunk. They are shown leaning towards the viewer like open hands, palms forward, left and right. Gainsborough catches perfectly their sculptural qualities, the heavy central rib, the wavy, scalloped, almost rococo edges. What burdock suggests in these pieces is that beauty can reside in the uneven and the asymmetrical - in the idea of weediness, in fact.
"Almost contemporary with Gainsborough, Joseph Wright of Derby's outdoor portrait Sir Brooke Boothby shows his reclining subject's feet resting in a shoal of burdock leaves...
This was to allude to the fact that Sir Brooke Boothby was a follower of Rousseau and a lover of nature - he was founder of the local botanical society.
"Close inspection will reveal burdock clumps in Richard Wilson, J M W Turner, John Linnell, James Ward, John Constable and Edwin Landseer. ... burdock has no specific symbolism, which is maybe why the Pre-Raphaelites largely ignored it.
"The true master of burdock display is George Stubbs, and in several of his pictures the plant is much more than a tonal ornament or filler of awkward spaces. In A Lion devouring a Horse (1769) it plays such an active role in the dynamics of the picture... The leaves aren't the blandly smooth grey-green foliage - leaf as carved stone, perhaps - of Claude and Gainsborough. They are picked out in high, mortal detail.
"They are beginning to age, wilting at the edges, showing patches of brown rust. One is already dead, a tan husk drooping towards the ground. A weed, Stubbs seems to be suggesting, experiences stress and ageing like any other living thing.
"This is an unusual perspective on botanical beauty, that it might take the form of elegance under pressure - what you might call grace."
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