Water Lilies

Adolf de Meyer

ca. 1906, printed 1912 · Platinum print · Photographs

The critic Charles H. Caffin described this photograph by de Meyer as “a veritable dream of loveliness.” It is one of several floral still lifes de Meyer made in London around 1906–9, when he was in close contact with Alvin Langdon Coburn, a fellow photographer and member of the Linked Ring. Both men were inspired by the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1906 book The Intelligence of Flowers, a mystical musing on the vitality of plant life. De Meyer exhibited several of his flower studies, including this platinum print, at Stieglitz’s influential Photo-Secession galleries in New York in 1909. The image also appeared as a photogravure in an issue of Stieglitz’s art and photography journal Camera Work.

Artist

Adolf de Meyer

Date

ca. 1906, printed 1912

Medium

Platinum print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933