Five places to find vintage flower paintings

With summer around the corner, pretty up your home with a floral painting

Published: April 16, 2014 at 2:21 pm

From antiques fairs to high street stores, decorating has gone au naturel this summer.

Botanical prints have been all over the auction houses and garden wallpapers are being swiped on showroom walls at Graham & Brown, Sanderson and Little Greene among others. For atmosphere think Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie combined with pretty childhood storybooks like Brambly Hedge.

An easy way to bring a little of the fresh outside into your rooms? Buy a vintage flower painting and take inspiration for display from our May decorating feature.

Here are five places you can pick up a flower painting on any budget.

Starting with an authority on vintage flower paintings, you can buy a selected piece direct from collector and dealer Lisa Brown via her website. Lisa - whose styling has appeared on the pages of H&A - fell in love with flower paintings when her father bought her one as a little girl and hasn't stopped gathering them since. She recommends hanging them together on a wall for a riot of natural colours.

From £65. 07768 592297; vintageflowerpaintings.com

The ladies at Etalage specialise in sourcing antique paintings and prints. Their stand at the Bath Decorative Fair wowed us with a gorgeous wall of fern prints (more of which in our June issue, out 1st May) and they also have a great selection of insect and butterfly pictures coming in.

Prints around £45 each. 07775 834396; etalage.co.uk

Our favourite shop come Christmas time also has a wonderful array of printed papers hand blocked with organic shapes, which look fun framed and hung in different sizes en masse. They occasionally stock the odd 19th-century butterfly and flower print, like the one pictured above, too.

Victorian prints around £185 each. 020 8878 8902; tobiasandtheangel.com

A key fixture on the H&A calender, The Decorative Living Fair is inspirational just for its setting in the lovely grounds of Eridge Park if nothing else. Of course, nothing else is not the case at all and there's a huge number of rustic vintage and pretty antiques stalls to browse. Flower paintings are just the kind of thing you are likely to find. Reader Anne Catliff picked one up both last year and the year before. Last year's, a lovely poppy covered canvas, cost just £25.

The Decorative Living Fair , Thursday 8th May, Eridge Park, Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Tickets £7.50. 01435 883136; carolinezoob.co.uk

One name to look out for in the world of flower prints and paintings is 20th-century British artist Vernon Ward. You can find a selection of his prints for sale online (or, if you're based near Lancaster, in the pretty shop) at Lavender House Vintage. Most are classic arrangements framed in worn gold frames. Leant against a mantelpiece or on a shelf, they give a forgotten air of calm country living.

Vernon Ward prints around £29.99. 01524 380729; lavenderhousevintage.co.uk

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