"Paint all sorts of flowers on pieces of card or cardboard, as roughly as you like, using just a single layer of paint; make five or six of each colour, or as many as there are tints, red, blue, purple, mauve or violet, but six of each. These will be the capital flowers. Besides these make smaller ones, for chequering, of red, blue, yellow and white, as pure of colour as you can. Cut all of these apart, and place each colour in an orderly manner in little boxes. Then paint a green Festoon or Bouquet on a plank or on cardboard, complete with foliage; on which you can place such flowers as you want, arranging and rearranging them in accordance with your thoughts." Gerard de Lairesse, Groot Schilderboek (Great Book of Painting), 1710 Gerard or Gérard (de) Lairesse (11 September 1641 – June 1711); Dutch Golden Age painter and art theorist. His broad range of talent included music, poetry, and theatre. De Lairesse was influenced by the Perugian Cesare Ripa and French classicist painters as Charles le Brun, Simon Vouet and authors as Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine. His importance grew in the period following the death of Rembrandt. His treatises on painting and drawing, Grondlegginge der teekenkonst (1701), based on geometry and Groot Schilderboek (1707), were highly influential on 18th-century painters. ...De Lairesse suffered from hereditary or congenital syphilis, which caused him to go blind around 1690. The saddle nose which the disease gave him is clearly visible on the portrait which Rembrandt painted of him around 1665 and the engraving in the "Teutsche Academie" by Joachim von Sandrart (1683). After losing his sight, De Lairesse was forced to give up painting and focused instead on lecturing twice a week. De Lairesse explicitly states that despite his blindness, he is perfectly able to design a perfect composition. He drew on two chalk boards and was assisted by his audience and his son Johannes who ... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_de_Lairesse) undefined

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