Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer[1] (12 January 1636 – 20 February 1699) was a Franco-Flemish painter who specialised in flower pieces.

He was attached to the Gobelins tapestry workshops and the Beauvais tapestry workshops, too, where he produced cartoons of fruit and flowers for the tapestry-weavers, and at Beauvais was one of three painters[2] who collaborated to produce cartoons for the suite The Emperor of China.

[4] In 1690, he left France for England, to work on painting decorations for Montagu House, Bloomsbury, London, where he produced over fifty panels of fruit and flowers for overmantels and overdoors, some of which have survived at Boughton House, Northamptonshire.

[6] His suites of engravings, most notably Le Livre de toutes sortes de fleurs d'après nature[7] show flowers with botanical accuracy and served decorative designers for decades.

[8] In the twentieth century the poet Wallace Stevens invoked Monnoyer's title Livre de toutes sortes de fleurs d'après nature in his philosophical poem "Esthéthique du Mal", whose centrality to Stevens' work was stressed by Harold Bloom;[9] for Stevens "all sorts of flowers" epitomized the anodyne and sentimental poem, attempting to address and assuage "all sorts of misfortune".