On 22 June 1936, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, issued a press release announcing ‘a very unusual one-man, one-week show, which will be opened to the public Wednesday, June 24, at one p.m.’ The one man was Edward Steichen, at that time chief photographer for the Condé Nast magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair, and the best-known, most handsomely paid man in the game. The works to be exhibited, however, were not the high-contrast, high-drama portraits of screen stars and couture models that had made his name.
Instead, as the sun rose on the morning of 24 June, Steichen carefully loaded a refrigerated truck with hundreds of delphinium spires at his 400-acre farm near Ridgefield, Connecticut, for a three-hour drive to West 53rd Street, where they were displayed in voluptuous sprays of blue in three small galleries on Moma’s ground floor. ‘To avoid confusion,’ the press release explains, ‘it should be noted that the actual delphiniums will be shown in the Museum – not paintings or photographs of them. It will be a “personal appearance” of the flowers themselves.’
At the time of the show, Steichen had been breeding delphiniums for the best part of 30 years. His first experiments took place in the small farming village of Voulangis, just east of Paris, a city whose artistic siren-song had lured him in 1900. Leasing a farmhouse and several acres of fields in the area, he bred flowers in search of the purest, richest blue – a pursuit fitting for the painter he still was at the time. (He retired his brushes and fully dedicated himself to the lens in 1920.) Delphiniums, Steichen later wrote, ‘made an appeal by beauty beyond anything I had ever experienced with flowers before’. The years Steichen spent between New York and Paris were a time of artistic peregrination, famously memorialised in his tenebrous Symbolist images of Auguste Rodin in his studio. But Steichen’s plantsmanship did not go unnoticed: in 1913, he won a gold medal from the French Horticultural Society for one of his delphiniums.
Forced to relocate by World War I (which he spent as a reconnaissance photographer in the US Air Force), Steichen took up flowers again after purchasing Umpawaug, his Connecticut farm, in 1928. Through the 1930s and 40s, he ploughed money from his lucrative commercial photography into his project, breeding and cross-breeding delphinium cultivars, spraying them with vitamin concentrates and immersing them in highly toxic colchicine, which had recently been discovered to increase a plant’s chromosomes, making previously infertile hybrids fertile. He created hundreds of new varieties. He named some of them after poets.‘The breeding of flowers is to me a creative art,’ he once said, ‘using living materials that have been developing for thousands of years to make poetry.’
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Although Steichen, with his perfectionist eye, ploughed the vast majority of his delphiniums back into the soil, 26 new varieties were shown at Moma. Steichen Delphiniums remains the first and only exhibition the museum has dedicated to cut flowers. In 1936, the museum was not yet the venerable canon-keeper that it has become, but it must nevertheless have been extraordinary to see its sombre white halls filled with something as straightforwardly beautiful as massed delphiniums. The paintings and sculptures Moma exhibited were moving further and further away from being referential – earlier in 1936, director Alfred J. Barr’s groundbreaking Cubism and Abstract Art charted the rise of abstraction as the century’s most potent expressive form.
But if abstraction was the move away from the specific towards an idea of the universal, the flowers were absolutely individual, material, uncapturable in their living iridescence. Was the show a conceptual gesture? Perhaps. Barr was known for pushing an expansive view of what art could be (on an often sceptical public). And Steichen himself had a radically democratic understanding of beauty, strident in the belief it applied equally to his commercial and non-commercial work. Whatever the reason it came about, Steichen Delphiniums was a popular success. The extensive press coverage, aside from grumblings by some commentators about not looking out of place in a country fair, was positive.
Part of the enchantment of the exhibition, of course, is that nothing of it remains bar a few black-and-white installation shots. Some, taken by Steichen himself, feature an elegantly attired young woman (a fashion model?) sitting on the raised display platform. Next to her hand is a small sculpture of a group of dolphins by Gaston Lachaise: a reminder that the delphinium’s connection to art dates back to ancient times. Named by the Greeks after the dolphin whose bottlenose its unopened buds suggest, the delphinium was a symbol of Apollo, god of the arts and music, who had his great temple at Delphi.
Lachaise’s bronze, borrowed from Knoedler for the occasion, presumably endures, but the flowers have long since perished. If I can conjure the exhibition’s glorious floral abundance, it’s because I had the rare opportunity to experience something similar when we were shooting this feature, a homage to Steichen Delphiniums, with photographer Tim Walker last summer. The setting in this instance was as close to an ancient temple as can be found in southwest England: the scaled-down replica of the Pantheon that sits by the lake at Stourhead, furnishing Henry Hoare’s Grand Tour-inspired garden with its most celebrated view.
The floral offering came courtesy of Blackmore & Langdon’s, which has done much to shape what Steichen, in a lecture given to the Horticultural Society of New York in 1937, referred to as ‘the modern English delphinium’. If the breeding of the species is an art, the Somerset nursery is among its foremost practitioners. Founded in 1901 by two local growers who met exhibiting prize begonias at the Bath Flower Show, the firm has brought hundreds of varieties of delphiniums to market, producing just over 40 today at its growing centre south of Bristol. Now in the hands of the fourth generation of Langdons, it was winning golds at Chelsea before it was Chelsea: each spring, a B&L liveried, flower-filled railway carriage would be manoeuvred down the steep hills of Bath from the nursery to the train station, where a steam engine would tow it to London for its bounty to be exhibited, first at Temple Gardens and, from 1913, at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, for the RHS Great Spring Show. Simon Langdon, one of the three sons currently in charge, estimates that Blackmore & Langdon has won between 90 and 100 RHS Chelsea Flower Show golds for their striking displays of delphiniums and begonias.
Steichen certainly knew of Blackmore & Langdon’s, describing in the same 1937 lecture the ‘beautifully proportioned spike, beautiful colour, beautiful architecture’ of its plant strains. No record exists of any B&L delphiniums having made their way to Umpawaug, although it’s not impossible: they are to be found in the herbaceous borders of almost every great house in the British Isles, and many beyond. They were also a brushstroke on the greatest canvas of art history’s most famous garden.
Claude Monet’s Giverny. Seed collecting in Monet’s day was something of a gentleman’s pursuit, although developments over the course of Steichen’s lifetime and since have made it less so. A packet of ‘Connecticut Yankee’ seeds, the only cultivar Steichen ever brought to market, can be purchased today for less than $5. There is no mention of Steichen on the traders’ websites, but those lucky enough to have the right growing conditions can live with a Steichen (or several) – at least for a summer.
The story of Steichen as a horticulturist will be more fully explored in an upcoming book, ‘Edward Steichen and the Garden’, by Sarah Anne McNear, who assisted with this article. The book will be published by the George Eastman Museum in spring 2026 to coincide with a related exhibition, which will travel to other museum venues in 2027.
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