In addition to his many talents as a photographer, painter, designer and curator, Edward Steichen was an accomplished horticulturist, breeding a wide array of flowering plants in his gardens in France and, later, in Connecticut. Many of these became subject matter for Steichen’s art, including his 1913 multi-panel tempera and gold-leaf mural, In Exaltation of Flowers, and his now-iconic photograph, Heavy Roses, Voulangis. Most famously, Steichen began a series of photographs of sunflowers in the early 1920s that he called From Seed to Seed, from which the photograph offered comes. In his 1963 memoir, A Life in Photography, Steichen said that the series was still ongoing at that date, but his most memorable images are from the 1920s.
This image, with one large sunflower bending toward a smaller one amidst a spray of foliage is emblematic of the series, in which the lifecycle of the plant is encapsulated within the frame of one photograph. The depth of this print’s tonality, and the lushness of its composition, is reminiscent of Heavy Roses. Carl Sandburg’s notations on the verso of this print anthropomorphize the two blossoms as follows: ‘big & little sunflowers. “Like big nun wrapping itself around an orphan.”’
This photograph was originally given by Edward Steichen to poet, journalist, and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg. Steichen was introduced to Sandburg by his sister Lilian in 1907 on the Steichen family’s farm in Wisconsin. The two young men shared an intensity of interest in their respective fields, as well as a belief in finding an artistic voice that was distinctly American yet also emphatically new. Sandburg and Lilian Steichen married in 1908, thus cementing the personal and professional ties between the writer and photographer, ushering in a decades-long period of mutual creativity. Sandburg was a frequent subject for Steichen’s lens, and Steichen designed the jacket for Sandburg’s first book of poems. In 1929, Sandburg published Steichen The Photographer, a limited edition retrospective monograph. The two collaborated on a number of photography-related projects including the wartime Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Road to Victory. Throughout their lives, the two maintained a friendship characterized by a deep admiration of the work of the other.
