The language of flowers in nineteenth-century American painting

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 1999 by Judith Walsh

2 Seaton, Language of Flowers, pp. 66-67.

3 See ibid., pp. 61-111; and Nicolette Scourse, The Victorians and Their Flowers (Croom Helm, London, and Timber Press, Portland, Oregon, 1983), pp. 29-65.

4 The main marketing strategy for these books seems to have been their elaborate bindings and decorations. One of the more ingenious strategies was to describe the various parlor games that could be played using the meanings of flowers.

5 Seaton writes: "In contrast to the French meanings, which depict the love affair as a profoundly spiritual experience not relating to marriage or social life, these American emblems reveal the love affair as seen in American culture, the business of young people seeking marriage partners in a highly visible, highly social milieu" (Language of Flowers, pp. 135-136). See also Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1993), pp. 269-271.

6 N.p.

7 N.p.

8 Pp. iii-iv.

9 (Boston, 1859), preface. This is the book that the artist Thomas Moran (1837-1926) received as a pupil at Harrison Boy's School in Philadelphia as a prize for drawing. He kept the book throughout his life (Thurman Wilkins, Thomas Moran: Searcher for Beauty, 2nd ed. [University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1998], p. 25).

10 Anonymous (New York, [1878?]), p. 221.

11 For a treatment of flowers in the work of Ford Madox Brown see Gerard Curtis, "Ford Madox Brown's Work: An Iconographic Analysis," Art Bulletin, vol. 74, no. 4 (December 1992), pp. 623-634. Penelope Fitzgerald alludes to Burne-Jones's use of the language of flowers in Edward Burne-Jones: A Biography (Michael Joseph, London, 1975), pp. 97-98; and Sarah Hamilton Phelps Smith uses the Pre-Raphaelite penchant for entwining the literary and the visual in her study "Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Flower Imagery and the Meaning of his Painting" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1978).

12 He found at least one painter, George Harvey (1799-1877), who was documented as using the specific meanings of the language of flowers. Two paintings exhibited by Harvey in 1843 in New York City listed the flowers depicted and their sentiments in the exhibition catalogue (Painters of the Humble Truth.' Masterpieces of American Still Life, 1801-1939 [Philbrook Art Center with the University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 1981], p. 121).

13 Reflections of Nature: Flowers in American Art (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1984), p. 183, n. 51.

14 Miss S.C. Edgarton [Sarah Carter Edgarton Mayo; 1819-1848], The Flower Vase (Boston, 1853), n.p.

15 Books published simultaneously in England and the United States were avoided, although in this pre-copyright era books were freely pirated and published under different imprints.

16 Tara Leigh Tappert, Cecilia Beaux and the Art of Portraiture (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C., 1995), pp. 108-109.

17 (New York, 1859), p. 96.

18 Royal Cortissoz, John La Farge: A Memoir and a Study (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1911), pp. 135-136.

JUDITH WALSH is the senior paper conservator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.