Long before Marilyn Monroe, Soup Cans or the Factory, Warhol was a successful commercial illustrator in 1950s New York. His early drawings reveal a rather different side to the artist we now associate with mechanical reproduction.

Floral arrangements and whimsical bouquets frequently appeared in these works. Take Mexican Flowers from 1961. Roses, in particular, feature among Warhol’s more delicate illustrations, rendered with the distinctive, slightly broken line of his early drawing style. These intimate works sit in stark contrast to the bold screenprints that would follow, but his fascination with flowers was already firmly established.

Following the success of his exhibition of Flowers paintings at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1964, Warhol returned to the subject in 1970 with his portfolio of ten hibiscus screenprints, and again in 1974 with a portfolio depicting ten different arrangements of flowers in vases (Black and White and Hand-Colored). Featuring sunflowers, thistles and other blooms, the compositions were screenprinted predominantly in black before being individually coloured by hand. Together, they reveal two sides of Warhol’s practice: the mechanical and the handmade.

But now it’s going to be flowers—they’re the fashion this year. They look like a cheap awning. They’re terrific!

- Andy Warhol, 1964

Warhol's most famous flowers arrived in 1964, almost by chance. The source was a photograph by Patricia Caulfield published in Modern Photography. Warhol cropped the original image into a square, simplified its details and transformed the flowers into flat areas of intense colour against a tangle of grass. The same four hibiscus blooms could then be repeated, rotated and recoloured almost indefinitely.

The timing was significant. Warhol had spent the preceding years exploring increasingly dark imagery through his Death and Disaster works. Flowers offered something apparently lighter, although their fleeting beauty still carried an obvious connection to mortality.

Later that year, Warhol devoted his first exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York to the subject. The gallery walls were covered with Flowers paintings in different sizes and colour combinations, often installed in grids that amplified their repetition. The exhibition was a critical and commercial triumph, with Castelli recalling that the show sold out.

It was a major moment in Warhol's career. A centuries-old artistic subject had been transformed into something unmistakably contemporary: flowers not as still life, but as Pop icons.

Warhol continued to return to flowers throughout the following decades, moving between highly graphic screenprints and more expressive drawings. In 1970, he revisited the four-hibiscus image for a portfolio of ten large-scale screenprints, published by Factory Additions in New York. Each used the same composition but dramatically altered the colours, reinforcing one of Warhol's central ideas: repetition does not necessarily make an image the same.

Four years later came the hand-coloured floral works, and flowers continued to surface throughout his drawings and wider practice. Much like Marilyn or Mao, the motif became a vehicle through which Warhol could explore colour, reproduction and the strange way an ordinary image can become iconic simply by being seen again and again.

Within Warhol’s celebrated 1970 Flowers portfolio, comprising ten works each from an edition of 250, Flowers F&S II.72 stands apart.

Across these compositions, Warhol experimented with vivid combinations of pink, red, blue, orange and yellow. In F&S II.72, however, he does something different: all four flowers are rendered in shades of yellow, making it the only work in the portfolio to use a single colour across every bloom.

Set against deep green grass, the effect feels surprisingly natural by Warhol’s standards. Yet the flowers themselves remain entirely artificial: flattened, saturated and almost logo-like. It is this tension that makes the work so distinctly Warhol. Nature has been processed through the visual language of advertising and mass production, becoming something familiar yet unmistakably manufactured.

Like Monet’s Water Lilies and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Warhol has his hibiscus. It’s no surprise they appear on the cover of the Catalogue Raisonné or that they keep appreciating in value on the secondary market. His flowers are never simply flowers. They’re just like the stars he painted: icons in their own right.