Early in his artistic training Joseph Stella showed a strong interest in studying flowers, something his teacher William Merritt Chase encouraged. Stella found inspiration for his drawings in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian and Flemish painters, and, in 1919, he began creating numerous silverpoint and crayon sketches of flowers, insects, and birds. Stella associated his floral imagery with themes of passion and sensuality, writing in his notes, “I was seized with a sensual thrill in cutting with the sharpness of my silverpoint the terse purity of the lotus leaves or the matchless stem of a strange tropical plant.”[1]

[1] Joann Moser, Visual Poetry: The Drawings of Joseph Stella (New York: Smithsonian Institution, 1990), 113.