June, from Twelve Months of Flowers n.d.

This is ‘June, from Twelve Months of Flowers’, an engraving made by Henry Fletcher sometime in the 18th century. It presents an idealized vision of nature, categorized by month, and neatly packaged for a leisured, probably aristocratic, audience. The print creates meaning through visual codes that would have been immediately legible to contemporary viewers. The flowers signify not just beauty, but the bounty of the British landscape, and the knowledge required to cultivate and classify them. This speaks to the growth of scientific societies and the importance of empirical observation during the Enlightenment. Each bloom is carefully arranged in a classical urn, reflecting the period's fascination with order and reason, a common motif in institutional art. Understanding this print requires research into the social history of horticulture, the economics of printmaking, and the class dynamics of 18th-century Britain. The meaning of art is always contingent on its social and institutional context.