Tag: narcissus

From “The Hybridiser’s Tale” in Daffodil: The Biography of a Flower by Helen O’Neill:

“There is probably no more daffodil-like daffodil than the Division 1a cracker called ‘King Alfred’, a plant so robust it has dwelt in my mother’s garden for at least the better part of a century…. As American Daffodil Society founding member George S. Lee Jr. pointed out in the Society’s 1966 Daffodil Handbook, sixty-seven years after this daffodil’s debut, it remained the most widely grown variety.

“‘Without question, the creation of King Alfred . . . was the greatest single advance ever made in the progress of daffodils,’ Lee wrote. ‘Those who think there is only one daffodil — the yellow trumpet seen in florists’ windows — have King Alfred in mind.’

“Upon its debut in 1899 this radiant flower immediately won over the Royal Horticultural Society’s Narcissus committee with its charisma, size, regal bearing and richly uniform gold tone. That year happened to be the millennial anniversary of the Anglo-Saxon King Alfred the Great’s death, hence its name. Percy Kendall, a grower from Devon, brought the flower to the committee, but Percy had not bred this flower; his father, John Kendall, a daffodil enthusiast and former solicitor who died nine years earlier, had. John was well known in the daffodil world and for the committee members, seeing ‘King Alfred’ must have been like meeting a ghost….”

From “Home Thoughts in Laventie” by E. Wyndham Tennant in Poems of To-day: Second Series by The English Association:

Beyond the church whose pitted spire
Seems balanced on a strand
Of swaying stone and tottering brick
Two roofless ruins stand,
And here behind the wreckage where the back wall
should have been
We found a garden green.

The grass was never trodden on,
The little path of gravel
Was overgrown with celandine,
No other folk did travel
Along its weedy surface, but the nimble-footed mouse
Running from house to house.

So all among the vivid blades
Of soft and tender grass
We lay, nor heard the limber wheels
That pass and ever pass
In noisy continuity until their very rattle
Seems in itself a battle.

At length we rose up from this ease
Of tranquil happy mind,
And searched the garden’s little length
A fresh pleasaunce to find;
And there some yellow daffodils
And jasmine hanging high
Did rest the tired eye….

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Hello!

This is the second of two posts with photos of early yellow-yellow daffodils that I took last week. The first post is Rise of the Yellow-Yellow Daffodils (1 of 2).

About half of the photos in this post were taken here…

… where the plants seemed perfectly happy to cling to a damp, steep, leaf-filled hill.

I took this group of photos from the sidewalk at the bottom of the hill — which you can see in the lower right corner — having discovered that I couldn’t stand on the hill and lean in to take close-up photos without tipping over. It’s steeper than it looks in the photo and was still soggy from the previous day’s thunderstorms. That I couldn’t get physically closer to the flowers (praise be the zoom lens!) got me thinking about something: after long, drenching rains, why didn’t the plants just let loose and tumble down the hill? Of course they have roots, but I puzzled on the possibility that there was something about daffodils that might make them resilient enough to stick-put despite relentless assaults from the clouds.

So — as one does! — I approached my research assistant with a tentative question: “I recently took some photographs of daffodils growing on the side of a steep hill…. I couldn’t help but wonder how they manage to stay in place there, especially since we’d had a lot of recent rain. What keeps them from just detaching from the soil and falling down the hill?”

To wit (or “to which”), Claude responded with a nice overview of the daffodil’s special skills:

Daffodils have an impressive ability to anchor themselves on steep slopes through several adaptations:

Their bulb and root system is their primary anchor. Daffodil bulbs are surrounded by fibrous roots that spread outward and downward, creating a network that grips the soil effectively. The bulb itself can work its way deeper into the soil over time through contractile roots — specialized roots that can contract and literally pull the bulb deeper into the ground.

The bulb shape is also advantageous on slopes. Rather than being perfectly round, daffodil bulbs are somewhat elongated and pointed at the top, which helps them wedge into soil crevices. This teardrop shape provides stability against downward forces.

Over time, daffodils naturalize by producing offsets (daughter bulbs) that grow adjacent to the parent bulb. These create dense clumps with intertwined root systems that significantly increase their collective anchoring power — essentially forming natural retaining structures within the soil…. Their strong, fibrous stems can flex without breaking during wind or rain.

The ability to grow successfully on steep terrain is actually one reason daffodils have been so successful both in the wild and in garden settings. Their effective anchoring system allows them to colonize areas that many other plants cannot, giving them an ecological advantage.

So the next time you plant or transplant some daffodils (or look at some pictures of daffodil roots), you will now know that their root system is “designed” to cling to soil on a hill, and that little cluster of bulbs that look a bit like radishes have their own job to do, acting as anchors to protect the plant by holding it in place.

This variety produces smaller flowers than those in my first post — though as you can see from these daffodils of the future, they’re still in their early stages of growing and blooming…

… and I’m sure I’ll make another trip back to the gardens to see how they’re progressing.

The rest of the daffodils are from the side of this walkway, where they’re being used as border plants so pollinators (and photographers) can get to them easily by ambling down the brick path.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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From Daffodil: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Most Popular Spring Flower by Noel Kingsbury:

“All wild daffodil species have now been used by daffodil breeders to produce the approximately twenty-seven thousand registered varieties, although the vast majority of garden and florist varieties are derived from genes from a limited number of species….

“The average garden daffodil has a big yellow flower with a big trumpet. ‘King Alfred’ (John Kendall, UK, 1899) is the best known and is everybody’s idea of a typical daffodil. It is derived from an Iberian species, Narcissus hispanicus, and if anything deserves the title of “ur-daffodil,” it is this. Narcissus hispanicus is a splendid plant, sturdy, richly coloured, early, and free-flowering. Only its distinctive perianth segments mark it out, as they are narrow and twisted — elegant but unlike the solid background for the trumpet we are used to. ‘King Alfred’ is a good example of [a Trumpet Daffodil], where each stem has a single flower where the length of the cup (i.e., the trumpet) is greater than or equal to the length of the perianth segments.

“Any cursory look at a collection of daffodils or at the pictures above the sale bins in a garden centre shows that there is a great deal of variation: there are white flowers and pale flowers, wide trumpets, narrow trumpets, trumpets which flare out a bit, and trumpets which veer towards orange, or even red-orange. There is often a difference in colour between the perianth segments and the cup… — these are referred to as bicolours, and it seems to be the general pattern that the cup is a richer yellow than the perianth segments. Except that there are some where the cup is paler than the perianth segments — these are known as reverse bicolours.”

From “From the Night of Forebeing” by Francis Thompson in Other Men’s Flowers: An Anthology of Poetry compiled by Archibald Percival Wavell:

Cast wide the folding doorways of the East,
For now is light increased!
And the wind-besomed chambers of the air,
See they be garnished fair;
And look the ways exhale some precious odours,
And set ye all about wild-breathing spice,
Most fit for Paradise!
Now is no time for sober gravity,
Season enough has Nature to be wise;
But now discinct, with raiment glittering free,
Shake she the ringing rafters of the skies
With festal footing and bold joyance sweet,
And let the earth be drunken and carouse!
For lo, into her house
Spring is come home with her world-wandering feet,
And all things are made young with young desires;
And all for her is light increased
In yellow stars and yellow daffodils….

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Hello!

This is the first of two posts with photos of the earliest daffodils that pop out of the ground in late February and early March here in the Southeast — where one can find them in bunches adding pre-spring color to yards, along sidewalks, and at places like Oakland Cemetery. The photos in this first post were all taken here…

… at a gated memorial garden in one of the cemetery’s oldest sections, where it’s fun to try and photograph the daffodils from different angles outside the fence, while using the wrought-iron bench or the black steel fenceposts as elements of the backgrounds.

The photos in these two posts are of daffodils I like to call yellow-yellow, because both the flower petals and their trumpets are shades of the same yellow color. As the season progresses over the next couple of weeks, others with alternating combinations of white, yellow, and orange will make an appearance, even as the yellow-yellow ones continue their bloom cycle.

As you can see from the photos, it was an overcast day when I took them, yet the colors are still so luminous that each of the flowers treats our eyes to a nice glow. One effect of the filtered lighting, in this case, is to add a little saturation to the daffodil trumpets, giving them a slight yellow-orange color cast that contrasts with the more translucent yellow of the petals surrounding the trumpets. Overall, though, the bright color is an attraction signal for pollinators, especially at this time of year when much of the surrounding landscape is still covered in its flat winter shades of brown and gray. While the gardens still wear this winter coat, the daffodils and the flower clusters they create are highly visible from long distances to both humans with their cameras and those emerging pollinators that want to get a jump on their spring business.

Thanks for taking a look!

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From Daffodil: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Most Popular Spring Flower by Noel Kingsbury:

“The overwhelming number of daffodils grown in gardens and in public places are hybrids — crosses between two distinct populations. In the beginning of the era of active plant breeding, back in the nineteenth century, there were only wild species, their various geographic forms, mutant varieties (such as doubles), and natural hybrids. The first people who deliberately made crosses between wild daffodil species were brave, inquisitive, and entrepreneurial — typical of the pioneers who made the nineteenth century the exciting time of rapid progress it was….

“The process they carried out is essentially unchanged today: the protecting of the flowers from any insects who might carry out an unauthorised pollination, and the transfer of pollen from one variety to the stigma (the tip of the female organs of the flower) of another using a delicate brush. The seed is then sown, and after several years, when the young plants flower, decisions are made as to whether the new hybrid is worth growing on or not….

“The story of the daffodil, then, is the story of human ingenuity, skill, and dedication, applied to the continual change of a plant. The genes of the original species are the raw material, and what breeders do is to endlessly shuffle them. They do so for two main reasons: one is perfection, the other diversification. Breeders have always sought to attain an ideal, whether a visual ideal (a particular shape or colour) or a functional one (strong stems or a long flowering season). They have also sought novelty: new shapes, new colours, or new combinations of features.”

From Daffodil: The Biography of a Flower by Helen O’Neill:

“[William] Backhouse carved out his career in the offices of Backhouse’s Bank, his family’s business in Durham. Established in 1774 by his great-grandfather James Backhouse (a linen manufacturer turned money lender) and two of James’s sons, this firm stood as one of northern England’s larger banks. Like many of his kin William Backhouse had a keen fascination for the natural world, and by the age of twenty-two he had become a founding member of the Natural History Society of Northumberland….

“Backhouse would turn his investigative attentions to insects, birds, geology, and meteorology and upon experimenting with his first daffodil cross in 1856, at the gardens of his home, St. John’s Hall, near Wolsingham, became utterly entranced.

“The mechanics of heredity fascinated him. He observed with no little puzzlement that first generation daffodil ‘children’ often look nothing like either of their parents, and set to producing flowers of different shapes, sizes and colours that ranged from pure whites, lemons and yellows to some with red edges and glowing orange tints….

“Backhouse began the first true daffodil dynasty. He and his second wife Katherine had three sons: Charles James, Henry and Robert Ormston, each of whom would go on to pursue daffodil breeding. Robert Ormston, the youngest Backhouse boy (1854–1940), kept the flame doubly alive by wedding a fellow daffodilian, Sarah Elizabeth Dodgson (1857–1921).

“As Mrs. R.O. Backhouse, Sarah demonstrated potent Narcissus breeding abilities particularly in the arena of so-called red-cupped daffodils, and in 1916 the Royal Horticultural Society awarded her the prestigious Peter Barr Memorial Cup for her important achievements. Two years after her death in 1921 her widower Robert christened ‘Mrs R.O. Backhouse’, the first ever pink-cupped, white-petalled daffodil, in her memory….”

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Hello!

This is the last of eight posts featuring daffodils from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The previous posts are Twelve Dozen Daffodils (1 of 8), Twelve Dozen Daffodils (2 of 8), Twelve Dozen Daffodils (3 of 8), Twelve Dozen Daffodils (4 of 8), Twelve Dozen Daffodils (5 of 8), Twelve Dozen Daffodils (6 of 8), and Twelve Dozen Daffodils (7 of 8). That’s a lot!

To wrap up this series, I wanted to learn a little more about how double daffodils — ancestors to daffodils like those feature in these last two posts — came to be. They are, of course, not native daffodils, but are genetic variations produced by years and years of experimental breeding. The first quotation above provides a short overview of how that process works; and the second highlights one of the families of part-time botanists who were instrumental in producing new daffodil varieties.

But a funny thing happened on the way to writing this post. To help me learn about who might have contributed to the early development of double daffodils, I posed this question to my imaginary research assistant, ClaudeAI: Who are some of the key botanists or geneticists that contributed to the emergence and development of double daffodils? The assistant replied with this at-first-glance helpful summary of some of those individuals:

“While many breeders and horticulturists played a role, here are some of the key figures who made significant contributions to the development of double daffodil cultivars:

“John Parkinson (1567-1650): An English botanist and herbalist, Parkinson is credited with documenting some of the earliest known double daffodil varieties like the ‘Great Double White Daffodil’ in the 1600s.

“Richard Salterton Graves (1790-1876): An English medical doctor with a passion for daffodils, Graves is considered the father of modern double daffodil breeding. He created many seminal double cultivars in the early 1800s.

“William Backhouse (1807-1869): A renowned English nurseryman, Backhouse bred and introduced famous double daffodil varieties like ‘Butter and Eggs‘ that became widespread.

“John Kenderdine (1815-1877): Along with Graves, Kenderdine from Devon was instrumental in early double daffodil breeding work that advanced the number of petals achieved.

“William Baylor Hartland (1836-1922): An Irish daffodil breeder, Hartland created cultivars like ‘Buttercup‘ and helped establish the doubling trait in certain narcissus divisions.

“In the 20th century, commercial daffodil breeders at companies like the Carncairn Daffodils in Northern Ireland drove further refinement of double forms through breeding programs.

“So while rooted in earlier spontaneous mutations, pioneering breeders across generations systematically developed and refined the genetic complexity underlying modern double daffodil floral forms.”

Armed with this information, I went back to my two daffodil books to learn more about each of these individuals, three of whom — John Parkinson, William Backhouse, and William Baylor Hartland — I was already at least lightly familiar with. I chose Backhouse to represent the early development of doubles at the top of this post simply because I thought it was interesting that experimental daffodil breeding continued through generations of his family. And one of the family members — Mrs. R. O. Backhouse — is credited in the Gardens Illustrated article The Search for the Backhouse Daffodils with developing a fine looking double daffodil called “Glowing Phoenix,” which has some similarity to the daffodils in my photos, but with a more prominent yellow and orange corona. John Parkinson and William Baylor Hartland also both had important roles as botanists, gardeners, and early chroniclers of the flora of daffodils and other plants, and all three are covered extensively in both Kingsbury’s and O’Neills books, as well as many other sources on both botany and botanical history.

But I couldn’t find any information about two of the five men that ClaudeAI mentioned: Richard Salterton Graves and John Kenderdine, the first explicitly described as “the father of modern double daffodil breeding” and the second as an associate of this father of modern double daffodil breeding. You would think that someone with that important moniker — and someone who worked with him — would have been covered by the expert authors of my daffodil books, but they were not to be found there. Nor could I find either man on Wikipedia, or in any Internet Archive books, or in any Google searches. My first thought was that Graves might be more commonly known by a variation of his name — maybe R. S. Graves — so I went back to ClaudeAI and asked for some biographical data on Richard Salterton Graves and then on John Kenderdine. ClaudeAI spit back this response…

“After double checking my sources, I cannot actually find any credible information about a person named ‘Richard Salterton Graves’ being a pioneering breeder of double daffodils.

“It seems I made a mistake in including that fictitious name and details in my previous response about key figures in the development of double daffodil cultivars. I clearly provided inaccurate information that I cannot validate.”

… and this one…

“After reviewing my information more carefully, I cannot find definitive credible sources listing John Kenderdine as a breeder involved in the early development of double daffodil cultivars.

“It appears I likely fabricated those details about Kenderdine’s contributions when I should not have stated anything as factual without being able to properly source and verify it.”

Whaaaattttttt is happening? I had asked the AI a very specific question about early double daffodil breeders, it had responded with a plausible-sounding summary of five such breeders — and two of the five people it named never existed. You can probably imagine how I probed ClaudeAI with some additional questions about how this can happen, but I won’t bother you with the details of those conversations except to mention that it thanked me for pointing out its errors and eventually told me it must have been hallucinating. Did someone feed it some daffodils? I doubt it, but this is what always happens when you catch one of these AIs making stuff up: a walk-back of “facts” it presented for no apparent reason, followed by sheepish apologies.

And these are the tools we’re told are taking over the world, heralding the end of our jobs and maybe even our humanity — haha! good luck with that! — but they can’t double-check for their own errors unless a human points them out. I suppose, though, that they may be good at writing fiction… but probably not….

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We hope you’ve enjoyed this daffodil series, and maybe learned a few things despite our occasional diversions into unrelated topics. Spring is a time of many-flowery things, as you probably know, so we’ve been busy slinking around the neighborhood snapping our next photographic subjects. Stay tuned for some (or all!) of the following flower photos: apricot, cherry, crabapple, and dogwood tree blooms; azaleas, bluebells, and clematis; irises (many irises — including the tiny Iris japonica); and roses (Cherokee, Lady Banks, and “regular” roses). We’re oh-so busy working our digital magic in The Darkroom!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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From Daffodil: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Most Popular Spring Flower by Noel Kingsbury:

“There is… a strong tendency towards an appreciation of the natural-looking across the gardening world; smaller daffodil varieties may be no more “natural” than large ones, but they tend to look it. In some ways this can be seen as part of a wider movement, which values the traditional, the local, and the supposedly authentic, against the modern, the hi-tech, and the corporate.

“Among modern daffodils there are several trends which spark particularly vehement reactions of antipathy: large flowers, doubles, and Split-coronas. Some flower sizes are now so big (in excess of 10cm/4 inches) that to many of us they look not only artificial but ungainly, as if familiar flowers had been fed on steroids….

“Doubles always stir strong emotions, with a minority of gardeners disliking almost any doubles. Double daffodils seem to evoke particular venom, possibly because the classic image of the flower is one so strongly associated with nature and the romance and simple beauties of spring. Thanks to its cup, the daffodil has a unique shape among flowers, and for many of us, once it loses this distinction, it loses its raison d’être and its soul. Although we know that nearly all the daffodils we see along roadsides are planted, there is part of us which wants to believe that they are wild — which we cannot believe if they are double.”

From Daffodil: The Biography of a Flower by Helen O’Neill:

“[One] by one, as if from nowhere, a few late-flowering daffodils began to appear. First ‘Mrs R.O. Backhouse’, so elegant with its pink cup and flowing white perianth; then ‘Sulphur Phoenix’, an ancient, frilly and really rather silly double daffodil that froths with cream and orange ruffles, and is known to my mother by the nickname ‘Butter and Eggs’….

“Another peculiar, all-white ghost of a Narcissus nodded as though beckoning me to it. Attired in a crenelated petticoat of a corona, its slender, sweptback ‘petals’ indicated that it could be ‘Thalia’, a pre-1916 Division 5 triandrus bred by M. van Waveren & Sons in The Netherlands or — just possibly — the eerie ‘Venetia’, a daffodil registered by Henry Backhouse in 1910 that has not been seen for years.”

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Hello!

This is the seventh of eight posts featuring daffodils from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The previous posts are Twelve Dozen Daffodils (1 of 8), Twelve Dozen Daffodils (2 of 8), Twelve Dozen Daffodils (3 of 8), Twelve Dozen Daffodils (4 of 8), Twelve Dozen Daffodils (5 of 8), and Twelve Dozen Daffodils (6 of 8).

For this (and the next — and last!) daffodil post, I’ve included photographs of some double daffodils that flower a bit later than other varieties and — from my experience — have very short-lived blooms. I’ve tried every year to catch them blooming and only did so twice previously (in 2020 and 2022). In addition to dying off quickly, these flowers — as top-heavy as they obviously are — tend to fall after a rainstorm and many of the flower petals will get damaged and spattered with red Georgia clay by landing on the ground.

Despite their thick stems — many of which look like fluted columns that ought to give them extra strength — they just don’t weather the weather very well. So this year I was glad to catch them at just the right time, especially after making several trips to the gardens to hunt them down. A couple of days after some thunderstorms, I found these newly bloomed and still more-or-less standing upright, while others — tipping over — had flowers remaining in decent condition. I really like this variety — perhaps partly because they’re rare finds for my floral photography — despite Kingsbury’s admonition against them in the quotation above. And, hey, even the curved stems have a certain elegance to them.

By the way, in the quote from Helen O’Neill’s book above, I included links to image searches for each of the daffodils she mentions — some of them are doubles, some have split coronas, and many are types you may not have seen before.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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From Daffodil: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Most Popular Spring Flower by Noel Kingsbury:

“The word ‘narcissus’ is linked inexorably with that of the beautiful boy Narcissus in Greek mythology, who was unaware of the intense love for him felt by the wood nymph Echo, who was cursed by being only able to repeat his last words. Eventually she pined away for him to such an extent that she became only a faint voice in the woods. As a revenge and punishment on Narcissus, Venus, the god of love, sent Cupid to cast a spell over him, so that he would fall in love with the first face he saw….

“What happened, of course, is that he leaned over a pool to drink and fell in love with his own image. Like Echo, he began to waste away with unrequited love, but the gods took pity on him, and turned him into a flower — a daffodil, probably Narcissus tazetta, which we know to have been grown in ancient Greece. Not surprisingly, daffodils came to symbolize both unrequited love and egotism in the Victorian language of flowers, and narcissism has come to mean a pathological sense of preening self-worth.”

From Daffodil: The Biography of a Flower by Helen O’Neill:

“In around 300 BC the Ancient Greek philosopher and botanist Theophrastus listed various daffodil strains in his nine-volume magnum opus Enquiry into Plants. He described the plant’s structure, remarked that garland-makers prized it and implied that his contemporaries even cultivated it. Theophrastus used the word ‘nardissos’ to describe the daffodil, a term the Romans would transmute into ‘narcissus’, and two theories compete as to why his culture selected this term.

“The first theory relates to the Greek word narkao, the root of the term ‘narcotic’, and the associated belief that daffodils, when eaten, had hazardously stupefying properties or, as various legends implied, quasi-demonic overtones….

“The second theory draws from the myth of Narcissus, a tale that ripples still through art, iconography, drama, psychology and popular culture. It spawned the notion of narcissism, refashioned by Sigmund Freud into a pervasive psychoanalytic concept that resonates today in the 21st-century’s selfie-obsessed digital landscape….

“Narcissus blithely breaks the heart of Echo, a nymph who pines away, able only to repeat his words, until she is nothing more than a ghostly disembodied voice. The youth’s scornful behaviour so appals the gods they decree that he shall never find satisfaction in love. One day while out hunting, Narcissus catches sight of his own reflection in water and falls desperately in love. Transfixed, he refuses to leave the object of his desire and wastes slowly away to death at the water’s edge. As nymphs mourn his tragic passing a flower grows from the soil, the head of which droops as though it, too, is gazing into its own reflection. The Greeks named the flower after the pitiful young man: Narcissus.”

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Hello!

This is the sixth of eight posts featuring daffodils from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The previous posts are Twelve Dozen Daffodils (1 of 8), Twelve Dozen Daffodils (2 of 8), Twelve Dozen Daffodils (3 of 8), Twelve Dozen Daffodils (4 of 8), and Twelve Dozen Daffodils (5 of 8).

The daffodils toward the bottom of this post — those with the white petals and coronas in shades of orange — are among my favorite spring flowers to photograph, and I always look for them growing in one specific area of the cemetery where they’ve been re-blooming for years.

In the previous post, we touched on some of the daffodil’s symbolism — in the context of nineteenth century floriography and (briefly) on cemetery symbolism. The daffodils and their genus Narcissus have become quite famous — and have even become famous for being famous — over the centuries of their appearance in the arts, owing, at least in part, to their connection to the Narcissus story from Greek mythology (as both Kingsbury and O’Neill describe above). Connections between our garden friends and the Greek myths is not unusual, of course — but Narcissus seems to enjoy a deep and enduring cultural history. For a couple of pretty fine overviews of their cultural prevalence, check out these two Wikipedia articles…

Narcissus in Culture

Narcissus Mythology: Influence on Culture

… the first of which provides a broad historical grounding for artistic representations of daffodils stemming from the Greek myth, and the second which describes how and when Narcissus (the plant) appeared in literature and paintings. The second article also references a third — Narcissus (Caravaggio) — which describes a painting by the Italian artist Caravaggio, that painting an interpretation of Narcissus from the myth, gazing at his own reflection.

You can see the painting on that page, or click here for a full-screen version. Caravaggio seems to have reduced the original myth to its essential visual elements only. Unlike many representations of the myth — which typically show Narcissus plentifully surrounded by woodland flowers and plants — Caravaggio (according to the book Caravaggio: A Life by Helen Langdon) distills it this way:

“In Caravaggio’s painting there is no reference to the ancient world; Narcissus is a young Roman boy, in a sleeveless damask doublet, looking into a pool; Caravaggio has pared down Ovid’s narrative, rendering its stark essence. The composition is based on a circle, and within it, circle within a circle, is Narcissus’ knee, startlingly foreshortened…. 

“The drawing is distorted, with the curve of the back unnaturally long, as though the whole figure has been pulled out sideways, and thus locked into the demands of this circular composition. It creates a sense of intense concentration, and the picture’s meaning lies in this circle of self-love.

“Yet it may also be read as a tribute to the illusionistic power of painting, to the power of the artist to create a duplicate world. Figure and reflection have almost equal weight, and reality and illusion are divided by touches of white water.”

I was mildly amused to come across all this this morning, because I had just finished watching Ripley — a new adaptation of the novel The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith — on Netflix last night, and one of the series’ most interesting variations from the 1999 film is the frequent appearance of Caravaggio’s paintings (and his life story’s common characteristics with that of Tom Ripley) throughout. The Talented Mr. Ripley and its film or series adaptations all seem to be thematically derived from the Narcissus Greek myth — in that the protagonist’s personality exhibits many characteristics of psychological narcissism, especially in that he is obsessively self-reflective, covets the life of another person, and is unable to form lasting relationships with others.

The Netflix adaptation makes these connections quite explicit, and also makes them visually compelling by incorporating Caravaggio’s paintings and elements of his biography. In various scenes where Tom Ripley stares at Caravaggio’s art (sometimes within the distortions of a dream sequence, echoing the distortions and illusions in Caravaggio’s Narcissus painting), just substitute Narcissus gazing at his reflection — and the relationship with the original myth becomes very clear. If such film-noir crime thrillers interest you, I have to say Netflix’s Ripley is about as good as they come. I’m tempted to watch it a second time, just to find out if Caravaggio’s Narcissus painting is among those the series displays.

I think I’ll test out the Narcissus myth myself: I’m heading outside to stare at my reflection in the pond, to see if I turn into a daffodil!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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