Michael Wainwright chooses Painting of Flowers:
'My wife, Annie, and I were on our honeymoon in 1990. We were on a bus to Todi from the monastery where we were staying when we saw this painting and really liked it.
'We walked to the shop later that evening, but it was closed and we were moving on to San Gimignano next morning. A few days later, I found myself really wanting to buy it, so we telephoned the shop and, in my wife’s pidgin Italian, arranged for funds to be wired from Barclays Bank in England – £1,000 was a lot of money for us then.'
'I don’t think the painting is particularly valuable, but it has pride of place in our drawing room, if only for the memories it evokes.'
Michael Wainwright is the fifth generation of his family to own the jewellers Boodles, which was founded in 1798.
John McEwen chooses Painting of Flowers:
For the first time in the decade-long life of this page, neither the selector nor I knows anything about the selected artist. He thought it was by ‘G. Rocca’, but closer inspection shows it is signed by Giuseppe Cocco, a listed Italian flower and still-life painter.
A mystery remains: are the flowers – rose-like in bloom and leaf, but not much else – a hybrid of the artist’s imagination as they spring from the earth, some white, some pink, in joyful arrangement against the slightly threatening grey of what one assumes is the sky?
What makes us pick one painting – one anything – as a favourite choice beyond all others? Sometimes, the invitation to choose an image for this page causes anxiety – exceptionally, even refusal. Anyone who has had a clearout will understand. Yes, we will keep that picture because it has some financial value, but is it really our ‘favourite’? How can one possibly pick just one above all others?
Yet how wonderful that so many people have been willing to do so, revealing through their different tastes the incredible variety and richness of the world’s store of pictures.
Thirty years ago, there were the honeymooning Wainwrights travelling along aboard a local bus in lovely Umbria, when they suddenly saw the Cocco flowers. Later, they found the shop and gazed through the window at the intermingled pink and white blooms. What could better describe their new marital state!
Today, the picture has ‘pride of place’ in their drawing room, ‘if only for the memories it evokes’. But what memories and what better reason for choosing it as a favourite painting? ‘If only’, indeed!
Credit: The Kiss - Gustav Klimt
My favourite painting: Danielle Steel
Danielle Steel, the world's top-selling fiction writer, admits that 'Klimt stole my heart' with this wonderful work.
Credit: Courtesy of the artist’s estate/Alan Cristea Gallery
My favourite painting: Roger Wright
'Its typically powerful brushstrokes and juxtaposed gorgeous colours give a heart warming and evocative sense of fun and nostalgia'
My favourite painting: Penelope Lively
'I love William Nicholson’s work. His still-lifes are incomparable.'
My favourite painting: Sue Laing
'This picture both reminds me of her and throws into sharp relief the extraordinary advances made in military medicine and
My favourite painting: David Starkey
David Starkey shares the one painting he would own, if he could
My favourite painting: Nicholas Coleridge
Nicholas Coleridge chooses Maharana Jagat Singh attending an elephant fight by Syaji and Sukha as his favourite painting
My favourite painting: Jacqueline Wilson
'I looked at this painting and decided to write about a Victorian circus girl one day'
My favourite painting: Lauren Child
Lauren Child chooses her favourite painting for Country Life.
My favourite painting: Robert Macfarlane
Robert Macfarlane chooses his favourite painting for Country Life.
My favourite painting: Nicola Shulman
Nicola Shulman chooses her favourite painting for Country Life.
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