Mushroom painting

Mushrooms have long been a point of fixation for artists. Whether whimsical or associated with the death and decay poisonous varieties might offer, mushroom painting has been popular in various art movements and styles, whether it be prints, still-life paintings, book paintings, or Victorian fairy paintings. They’ve captured our attention since Mayan times all the way to the age of Instagram, with pages popping up such as @theartofmushrooms, which features various artists’ work that features mushrooms, including mushroom painting. Often it is referred to for its psychotropic properties, that is, its ability to affect mood, behaviour, thoughts, or perception. However, it may also be incorporated in paintings to represent the connectivity of mycelium, the underground dendritic system of mushrooms that connects and enables communication between living things. We’re going to look at some famous and striking examples of mushroom painting to get a better idea of what it is about these fungi that fascinate people so.

Mushroom Studies

One of the main reasons mushrooms began to crop up in art is for identification purposes. Botanical illustrations and paintings were used as a scientific record by botanists and natural scientists to classify and identify plants or mushrooms. This helped with identification for those studying mushrooms, but also for those who foraged for mushrooms, in order to distinguish between poisonous and edible mushrooms. However, unlike mushroom painting, most botanical illustrations were monochrome (drawn in pen and ink, or digitally now adays), as colour reproduction was too expensive. Now, with colour printing being much cheaper, botanical illustrations can become botanical paintings.

Unfortunately for some foragers, botanical paintings were more about aesthetics than botanical completeness. While the information provided by them was accurate, it was not always complete. These “plant portraits” if you will, became more about appealing to consumers than to natural scientists as cameras came into play and fewer people relied on paintings for identification purposes.

The style’s influence was pervasive, however, and one such example of this is Beatrix Potter’s Hygrocybe Coccinea. Yes, we’re talking that Beatrix Potter, beloved author of the Peter Rabbit series. The famed writer and illustrator was also a natural scientist and conservationist, so it’s not too surprising that when she chose to paint these mushrooms, she leaned heavily on the style of her predecessor natural scientists. The red-capped mushrooms, the edges of which flair up to reveal the gills, are depicted from various angles and even cut down the middle, in order to give the viewer the best means of identifying these mushrooms from whatever angle they’re encountered. Despite their seeming simplicity, Potter brings, dare I say, a touch of elegance into these curled up fungi, with deep shades of red and proud upturned caps.

Still Lifes

Like any other unsuspecting food that is come across by an artist stuck in the house, the mushroom has been subject to many still life iterations. Mushroom painting has been done by the likes of Sir William Nicholson, the British artist, and Pyotr Konchalovsky, a Russian artist, showing how international this obsession with mushrooms is. Painted towards the end of Nicholson’s career, Mushrooms exemplifies his work on one of his favourite subjects, also seen in other works entitled Mushrooms and Mushrooms on a Plate. Again, there is a simplicity to the still life, this time featuring the humble beige capped mushroom we’re all familiar with from Sainsbury’s, with brown gills and a long stem with a slanted tip. The painting was done in 1940, oil on canvas, and its broad wavering strokes bear traces of the Expressionist movement that had come before.

Interestingly enough, so does Konchalovsky’s piece, also entitled Mushrooms, which is a mix of Fauvism and Expressionism. Expressionism can be seen again in the style of brush stroke, but it’s the bold colours that mark it out for Fauvism. However, it cannot be said to be entirely in this style as, one, it’s a still life, which was uncommon for the movement, and, two, there’s an incorporation of darker colours which is also not indicative of Fauvism. Perhaps in choosing these bright colours for the mushroom painting, Konchalovsky was nodding, as many artists do, to the psychotropic and psychedelic aspects of mushrooms, their abilities to induce visions of bright and bold colours.

Victorian Fairy Paintings

For all their reservedness, Victorians without a doubt had an obsession with the fantastical and the macabre. This can be seen in a genre of paintings known as Victorian Fairy Paintings, which, shock and amazement, feature fairies. These paintings depict scenes of the hidden world of fairies, who cavort in the face of prudish Victorian convention. Whereas in other forms of mushroom painting the mushrooms are an object of study or full of the indifference of a still life, in these paintings the mushrooms appear as a central theme, something to be interacted with rather than just being part of the décor. This is seen in Walter Jenks Morgan’s A Fairy Ring. In this painting, the viewer stands behind a fairy whose back is turned to us, addressing instead, from atop a mushroom, her fellow fairies who sit in a ring, all on mushrooms. Rather than being simply a part of the landscape, they are an integral part of the fairies’ interaction, each one being a part of the ring only insofar as they have a mushroom to sit on. This perhaps refers to the connectivity of mycelium, their ability to bring the natural world and its inhabitants together. This theme recurs in Fairy Rings and Toadstools by Richard Doyle. In it, fairies dance around toadstools, one in particular being the very centre of the ring. Where one toadstool has fallen over in the mushroom painting, so have the fairies, suggesting the inherent connection between them and living things.

Book Paintings

Victorian Fairy Paintings have also had their influence on paintings done for books, such as the works of Arthur Rackham. The famed English book artist lived from 1867 to 1939, during which time he produced many great works and was considered one of the key figures of the Golden Age of British book art. Varying from whimsical to eerie, his works have populated the likes of Shakespeare’s plays, Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, Peter Pan, and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Often these paintings feature fairies with mushrooms, unsurprising given Rackham was a Victorian artist. This can be seen recurrently in his illustrations for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in both the 1908 edition and the accompanying illustration for Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. In the former, mushrooms appear in his delicate and stunning work Come, Now a Roundel, featuring a small fairy in a diaphanous dress carefully weaving amongst a circle of mushrooms. Meanwhile, in Lamb’s works, Where is Pease-Blossom is done in a unique Art Nouveau style, which is inspired by natural forms, such as the sinuous curves of plants and flowers. It is unsurprising, then, that yet again mushrooms appear, this time as a stepping stool on which a fairy stands to place something atop the donkey’s, Bottom’s, head. Again, the mushroom alludes to connectivity and communication, enabling the fairy to communicate and interact with a mortal.

But book illustrations aren’t all fairies and mushrooms. The psychotropic nature of mushrooms is also explored, especially in the images produced for various editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In Tenniel’s original illustrations, specifically that of Alice and the Caterpillar, mushrooms appear. Not only does Tenniel reference Victorian Fairy Painting, as the mushroom is used as a pedestal for the caterpillar, serving to establish the hierarchical relationship between Alice and the Caterpillar, it also references the psychotropic associations with mushrooms. The Caterpillar smokes a hookah in this image, further alluding to psychotropics and the opening of perceptions of reality that mushrooms can allow. This is augmented by the text that accompanies the painting, in which the Caterpillar asks Alice “Who are you?”. In doing so, he means to open her perception of who she is and the mushroom is emblematic of this.

Similarly, Salvador Dali’s own paintings for the 1969 edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland allude to the psychotropic capacity of mushrooms. An icon of surrealism, Dali sought to release unconscious creative potential through art that featured dreamlike imagery. This is well suited to mushroom painting that refers to magic mushrooms. Mushrooms appear in various forms in four of his paintings: Down the Rabbit Hole, Advice from a Caterpillar, Pig and Pepper, and A Mad Tea Party. In the latter two, the mushroom is not overtly depicted, but rather alluded to in the form other objects take. In A Mad Tea Party, Dali’s famous melting clock is perched atop a tree, giving the appearance of a capped mushroom. In Pig and Pepper, the vague form of a pig sits atop a dendritic tree, again taking the appearance of a pink capped mushroom. In both of these mushroom paintings, Dali seeks to open the viewer’s perception, to perceive the mushroom where it is not, yet simultaneously is through a combination of unrelated shapes. He recreates the psychotropic effects of mushrooms through his art.

So Why Mushrooms?

It’s safe to say there are at least two reasons artists create mushroom painting, though there are many more reasons and artists I have not enumerated here. One is the connectivity they symbolise, the communication they enable. The other is their psychotropic capacity, their ability to open perception to new doors we may not have opened, or even known existed.