Make a Wish

It's Dandelion Day, when we honor the plant that has been cursed as a lawn weed yet touted as a salad green and herbal remedy.

Dandelion Seeds, Taraxacium officinale, taken by Bertha Jaques, is part of our online exhibition, American Photographs: The First Century.

Jaques was already a respected printmaker when she began making cyanotype photograms of wildflowers. An active member of the Wild Flower Preservation Society, she created over a thousand of these botanical images.

Made without a camera by placing objects directly on sensitized paper and exposing it to light, the photogram is the least industrialized type of photography. Because prints were easy to produce by this method, it achieved wide popularity.

Graphic artists often chose this form of print because of its rich Prussian blue color. Aligned with the anti modernist views of the late Victorian Arts and Crafts movement, Jaques's work reflects a reverence for commonplace elements of nature and the beautifully crafted object.

Source: Merry A. Foresta. American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996).

Pictured: Bertha E. Jaques, 1863–1941, Dandelion Seeds, Taraxacium officinale, about 1910, cyanotype photogram on paper, 13 5/8 x 2 7/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.