white boar painting

This is an A3 painting in poster-colours which I did 30-odd years ago, to mark the 500th anniversary of Bosworth.  I'd forgotten, until I looked at the scan, that I had carefully given the boar Richard's slightly anxious blue-grey eyes.

I've reduced this to 800 pixels' width to fit the page.  You can see the full-size, detailed scan here:

http://imaginarymongoose.co.uk/RIII/White_Boar.jpg

but it's 8mb, even as a .jpg, so it'll take a while to download.

What marvellous details and color harmonies!  

What are the yellow flowers, and what is their symbolic meaning?

Does A-3 have something to do with a school assignment, or did you do this for a Richard III Society Event?  If it was for school, were your teachers then open to non-traditional views of Richard?  Or were you taking chances with your grade?  Hopefully they were open-minded.

phaecilia

Thanks. The yellow flowers with the angular, stripey stems and the seed pods are broom - planta genista, the badge of the Plantagenets. Also the subject of a Scottish folk song whose chorus refers to "The yellow on the broom".

I assure you I'm way too old - in fact, about ten years too old - to have been doing a school assignment in 1985! I did do this in part to mark an RIII Soc trip to Bosworth, but mainly because it combined two of my pet interests - Richard, and heraldic art.

In any case at British schools - at least when I was young - there were no such things as grades. in that sense. Your annual results depended exclusively on how you did in the summer exams. Marks given at other times existed solely to let you know whether you were measuring up to the standard you were going to need to meet in June.

At my school -which I attended 1970-77 - each year had a bookcase in the corner of the class which held a recommended reading list. That is, reading these books wasn't mandatory for any specific class, but it was strongly encouraged. In my second year (age12-13) one of them was The Daughter of Time.

Forgot to say - A3 is a size of paper, equal to two sheets of A4. A5 is half of A4, and so on.

Love it. Thanks for sharing.

I didn't think a boar could be fierce and beautiful, but this one is.

whitehound wrote:

Thanks.  The yellow flowers with the angular, stripey stems and the seed pods are broom - planta genista, the badge of the Plantagenets.  Also the subject of a Scottish folk song whose chorus refers to "The yellow on the broom".  [Snip]

At my school -which I attended 1970-77 - each year had a bookcase in the corner of the class which held a recommended reading list.  That is, reading these books wasn't mandatory for any specific class, but it was strongly encouraged.  In my second year (age12-13) one of them was The Daughter of Time.

I've heard the song, but I haven't seen Broom on my walks around here.  I'm going to ask about it in the botanical garden next time I visit.  It's a big place, and they have so much growing there, I could easily have missed it.

It's good to hear Daughter of Time was on your recommended reading list.  It sounds like that teacher was open minded. Josephine Tey did a lot to counteract Shakespeare's caracature.

phaecilia

I don't know if a botanical garden would have broom or not. They ought to because it's beautiful, but it's also very common, both in the wild and in gardens, so they might think it was infra dig.

It turns up in another great Scottish song about Galloway, which has the chorus

The Gallowa' Hills are covered wi' broom
Wi' heather bells in bonny bloom
Wi' heather bells an' flowers a'
An' we'll gang out ouer the hills tae Gallowa'.

You can see the flower, and the bush, here http://www.wildflowersofireland.net/plant_detail.php?id_flower=37&Wildflower=Broom

Actually if you want to see broom, your best bet may be a garden centre.  There are many pretty colour-variants, from off-white through yellow and orange to quite dark red, which are sold for the garden.

whitehound wrote:

I don't know if a botanical garden would have broom or not.  They ought to because it's beautiful, but it's also very common, both in the wild and in gardens, so they might think it was infra dig.

It turns up in another great Scottish song about Galloway, which has the chorus

The Gallowa' Hills are covered wi' broom
Wi' heather bells in bonny bloom
Wi' heather bells an' flowers a'
An' we'll gang out ouer the hills tae Gallowa'.

You can see the flower, and the bush, here http://www.wildflowersofireland.net/plant_detail.php?id_flower=37&Wildflower=Broom

Many thanks, whitehound!  

It's good to find out about this Galloway song.  I don't remember hearing it, but this is a good opportunity for serendipity.

This wildflowers of Ireland link is helpful.  I don't have a great memory for Latin plant names, but I noticed that the currently used Latin name for Broom (Cytisus scoparius) isn't planta genista.  I'll see what I can find around here.  Another good opportunity for serendipity.

phaecilia

Planta genista is its name in Latin, but I can't remember if it was ever its "Latin name" in the formal sense of a scientific classification.

Incidentally, broom is very close to gorse, except that broom doesn't have thorns. And you know what they say about gorse, don't you? "When the gorse is out of flower, kissing's out of season." That's because there are multiple species and varieties of gorse whose flowering is staggered in such a way that some kind of gorse is in flower somewhere for all but about two weeks a year.

This is lovely!  You have a fantastic eye for color.