Here is the story of the “Buddha in the Flowers” painting and how I came to purchase the painting:

The circumstances surrounding my purchase of the “Buddha in the Flowers” painting are still somewhat mysterious to me. I have been an art dealer for over 40 years and I deal mostly in abstraction and American modernist paintings of the early 20th century and contemporary art. This painting is a circa 1890 classic still life of flowers, daffodils in a vase on a table with a spray of violets lying next to the vase. Not the usual kind of artwork that I deal in at all. It was offered to me through photographs sent to me by a “picker” who often found other art for me.

I had never previously purchased any still life paintings to resell, but for some reason, I was attracted to this one and wound up purchasing it. And I did not know the work of this artist* at the time, but he was a known 19th century Florida artist.


It was the only time that I had chosen to purchase a still life for my inventory, and I have still never purchased another one since this purchase about 30 years ago. It was a very intuitive and spontaneous purchase. There was a certain quality of beauty about this painting, which really drew me in, and I thought that I would be able to sell it very quickly, within days or even weeks of my acquiring it. The frame on the painting was also a very beautiful and ornate turn of the century gold leaf frame, which enhanced the beauty of the artwork as well.



When the painting arrived, I hung it in the rear of my gallery near my office, as it did not fit in with the contemporary art that was always hanging in the main show space of my gallery. Over the next three years or so it hung there, and was visible to all who entered my gallery. Many people admired it and commented on its beauty and I had some good discussions with several clients who were drawn to it and yet they did not get to the point where they wanted to purchase the painting. I was surprised and somewhat mystified that it did not sell quickly.



After trying to sell the painting for about three years, I decided to take it home. I hung it in my bedroom on the wall opposite my bed, as that was the only spot I had available for an artwork of that size. The wall had the perfect sized space for it to have its own niche. I read quite a bit in those days and I could see it while lying in my bed with a book.



About six months after hanging it in my bedroom I was lying in bed reading one morning. After reading for a while, I casually laid the book down on my chest to think about what I had read in the last few pages and I was absentmindedly staring at the painting when suddenly…… The face of a meditating Buddha came into clear view in the upper left quadrant of the painting. I sat up in bed, shocked, and I remember saying out loud to myself “Oh my God !“. The image was facing straight forward and only one closed eye was visible, with the nose and some of the mouth and chin, but the face was vivid and unmistakable

.

The face was so clear and three-dimensional that I wondered why I had not seen it previously. But I realized later that the face is also very camouflaged, as it is composed of the lights and darks of the artist’s colors and shading of the daffodils in the painting. And also, the meditating Buddha face in the painting had gone undiscovered for the last 120 years or so, as far as I knew.

As I went about my day, I kept returning to it, and every time that I looked at it the Buddha face was the most prominent aspect of the painting. And every time I have looked at the it since then the meditating Buddha is the most prominent feature.

There is an interesting fact about the timing of my discovery of the meditating Buddha face in the artwork. I saw the Buddha in the painting about a week or so after I had returned from an intuitive, self-directed weeklong immersion in nature by sitting on top of a sand dune on a somewhat small uninhabited island (Cumberland Island) off the coast of Georgia. I sat on top of a hundred foot dune overlooking the Atlantic Ocean for about six hours a day with a large towel covering me to shield me from the sun and with a bottle of water. It was so deeply relaxing for me that I truly felt a kind of deep shift within me that I still cannot put into words. And as I sat there looking out at the ocean, small flocks of wild turkeys would walk by 20 or 30 yards away, which is quite remarkable for wild turkeys as they are very alert and skittish birds. And deer and other animals would walk close by as well; so I felt fairly invisible on my perch on that dune looking out at the beautiful blue horizon of the Atlantic Ocean.

And it was about 10 days or so after I returned from my meditative vacation, when I was absentmindedly staring at the painting after reading in bed, that I suddenly saw very clearly the face of the meditating Buddha face in the flowers. It astonished me then, and it still astonishes me now. The painting is a complete visual Sutra on stillness leading to Buddha nature arising, all in one image.

About the Artist

The artist, George W. Seavey, died in 1913. He had been one of the original “Flagler artists” who had shown his paintings in the hotel lobby of the Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine, Florida, built by Henry Flagler, an industrialist and railroad baron towards the end of the 19th century.

The artist had offered and sold his paintings in the lobby of the hotel between 1890 and 1910, and this makes this painting approximately 110 to 130 years old, which is very early in American painting for a depiction of a Buddha to show up in a painting. The Buddha face image has apparently evaded notice for the past 120 years or so and is so well camouflaged as to be hidden from the casual viewer.