As hotelkeepers know, the safest picture to hang in a hotel bedroom is a flower print: it makes nobody mad, except an occasional connoisseur. That flower-painting can be as handsome and as accurate as Audubon's birds was proved last week in San Francisco.
On exhibit at San Francisco's De Young Museum were 440 watercolors from the days when the scientific picturing of flowers was an art, not a craft. The water-colors were the work of a talented early 19th Century French painter-naturalist, Pancrace Bessa.
When he painted his colors on parchment, every large French estate had its garden and greenhouse. All over the...
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