Indoor gardening in the eighteenth century - paintings of flower pots

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1999 by Patricia F. Ferguson

In light of the integration of architectural and decorative details to evoke emotions, the design of the shape and decoration of the finest bespoke garnitures should be related to the furniture, furnishings, wall finish, and even chimneypiece of the room in which they were displayed.

Evidence of just such an integration of floral containers and the rest of the interior appears in the work of Thomas Hope, the arbiter of elegance in Regency England. His influential Household Furniture and Interior Decoration is illustrated with drawings that document the principal rooms of his London house off Portland Place. In the illustration of the Flaxman Room (Fig. 1) a pair of flowerpots containing flowering shrubs is shown on the black marble mantel, while on the mantel in the drawing room, similar vases are displayed without flowers as an indication of the ornamental quality of the vases themselves.(30) The text makes no reference to these flowerpots, but Hope does remark on the importance of flower baskets and other purveyors of natural and artificial perfumes.(31) Soane visited Hope's house in 1804, when he opened it for public view.

An elegant, trumpet-shaped flowerpot is shown on the mantelpiece of what is presumably a boudoir in Plate XIV. It contains a sinuous hyacinth or perhaps a fashionable so-called Cape Bulb (a bulb from South Africa). In shape the pot resembles the Vase Jasmin introduced by the Sevres factory in 1801.(32) It was designed by the architect Alexandre Theodore Brongniart (1739-1813) for use by other architects.(33)

Clearly, by the end of the Regency period scented shrubs were incorporated into the interior landscape not simply for novelty but to stimulate the senses and evoke the appropriate emotions. Sadly, these aromatic plants no longer have their bouquet since Victorian gardeners concentrated on foliage at the expense of blossoms, and today's nurserymen have focused on large blossoms at the expense of fragrance.

1 Vol. 1, p. 254.

2 p. 66. Mary Capel Somerset (1630-1714), the duchess of Beaufort, was a noted botanist with a collection of several thousand exotics.

3 The fashion was recorded in a design for a state bed-chamber of about 1695 by Daniel Marot I (1661-1752). See Peter Thornton, Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1978), Pl. 50.

4 C. K. Currie, "The Archaeology of the Flowerpot in England and Wales, circa 1650-1950," Garden History: Journal of the Garden History Society, vol. 21, no. 1 (Winter 1993), p. 229.

5 P. 187.

6 P. 179.

7 For early delftware examples see John C. Austin, British Delft at Williamsburg (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, williamsburg, Virginia, with Jonathan Home Publications, London, 1994), Pls. 618-620. A porcelain example is illustrated in Bernard M. Watney, "The Vauxhall China Works 1751-1764," English Ceramic Circle Transactions, vol. 13, part 3 (1989), Pl. 202(c). For a concise discussion of red stoneware flowerpots see The Bertram K Little and Nina Fletcher Little Collection, Part II, Sotheby's (New York), October 21 and 22, 1994, Lot 557.