In 2022, Flora Yukhnovich was one of two artists invited to take part in Oxford’s inaugural Ashmolean NOW Program. She and Daniel Crews-Chubb were each invited to create responses to the museum’s historic collection. Yukhnovich did not choose pictures from the main picture gallery or even from the world-renowned collections of prints and drawings. Instead, she was strangely drawn to room 48, a quintessential “quiet corner” on the second floor, at the back of the museum.
This room, since 1948, has been home to the Daisy Linda Ward collection of Dutch and Flemish still lifes, pictures produced in the Low Countries in the 17th and early-18th centuries. They were brought together by Theodore W. H. Ward, a wealthy paint manufacturer who collected them over a period of about 25 years, from 1920 onward, at a time when the paintings were hopelessly out of fashion and prices were attractive. Numbering 94 pictures (there were 95, but Rachel Ruysch’s masterpiece Vase of Flowers was stolen in 1949), this is perhaps the largest coming together of still-life flower paintings in the world. It was a stipulation of the bequest that the pictures would always be shown together.
