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Check out our art-historical bouquet of the best paintings of flowers from Édouard Manet to Roy Lichtenstein.

Few things are as beautiful as flowers, so it’s no wonder that they’ve attracted the attention of artists from ancient times to the present. Beyond sheer beauty, flowers provide rich opportunities to play with color and form. The results can be found pretty much on any give day at museums around the world, and also in NYC at institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or MoMA or at one of the many galleries in Chelsea and elsewhere. If you need more convincing, check out our selection of the best flower paintings of all time.

Ann Craven’s paintings can seem maddeningly dashed off, but they embody a highly focused approach to medium and method. She often paints the same images over and over again, because whatever the subject at hand, her real interest is the relationship between observation, appropriation and reproduction. Flower, for example, is one of several nearly identical takes on the subject, and, as its titular timestamp suggests, is less about the flower as a form than it is about the flower as a marker of a certain moment and place.