The language of flowers in nineteenth-century American painting

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1999 by Judith Walsh

There is, of course, the problem of identifying painted flowers with certainty. For this article I have chosen to interpret a few representative paintings in which the flowers depicted can be unambiguously identified and in which their placement can be seen as deliberate. Thus genre paintings and portraits containing flowers were chosen over landscapes or paintings of gardens in which the placement of flowers may have been defined by nature rather than dictated by a symbolic narrative.

Cecilia Beaux painted the portrait shown in Plate XII shortly after the sitter was widowed. The sitter's husband, the poet and editor Richard Watson Gilder (1844-1909), had been a great friend of the artist.(16) Helena de Kay Gilder, dressed appropriately in black, holds a shoot of geranium ivy, symbolizing bridal favor. In The Poetry of Flowers, Frances S. Osgood explains the meaning of ivy by quoting "the author of a French work," who wrote:

Nothing is able to separate the ivy from the tree around which it has entwined itself; ...it falls when the tree is cut down. Death itself does not detach it, but it continues to decorate with its constant verdure the dry trunk it has chosen as its support.(17)

Ivy is associated with strong affection, and variously symbolizes friendship, marriage, fidelity, and even "I have found one true love," all of which are appropriate sentiments for a grieving widow.

Abbott Thayer's portrait of Jennie Remington [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE X OMITTED] shows the young sitter with a yellow tulip, which is rarely found in portraits. Its meaning was hopeless love. The expatriate Mary Cassatt painted the subject in Plate VII with a zinnia, representing absence or thoughts of absent friends. The daisies in Whistler's portrait of the young Cicely Alexander [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE II OMITTED] symbolize childhood innocence, taking that meaning from the poem To the Daisy (1802) by William Wordsworth. In this portrait, as is often the case in pictures where daisies are associated with children, the child turns her back on the flower, apparently innocent even of her own innocence. On the other hand, in the painting in Plate VIII, Whistler has used the language of flowers quite differently. The image of a woman in what may well be postcoital bliss, was shocking enough at the time, but her languid state could not be misunderstood since she holds the white lily upside down, which inverts its usual meaning, purity. Crushed beneath her feet are a white lilac (youth or the first emotion of love), and pansies (tender thoughts). The woman makes no pretense of sexual innocence. These signals must have been considered blatant by a Victorian audience, although they have been lost to us.

Richard Caton Woodville painted War News from Mexico [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XV OMITTED] during the height of the flower language craze. At the lower left-hand corner, in the shadow of the porch, grow yarrow (war) and perhaps wallflowers (fidelity in adversity). The dried grass scattered around the slaves symbolizes utility or submission. In Independence (Squire Jack Porter) [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XIII OMITTED] Frank Blackwell Mayer painted his relaxed subject smoking his pipe, his feet on his own porch rail, looking out over his property. Someone, probably the mistress of the house, has left her knitting on the windowsill. Jack Porter is the picture of contented life: he apparently has property, independence, a loving spouse, and time to enjoy it all. Sunflowers gaze back at him from their side of the porch rail, defining his reverie in their floral meaning. Concurrent with this painting, sunflowers were emblems of lofty and pure thoughts. They let us know that although we may envy the squire, he has earned his good fortune, as he spends his time in only the highest thoughts.