The language of flowers and other floral symbolism used by Winslow Homer

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1999 by Judith Walsh

Throughout his career Winslow Homer included flowers, shrubbery, and trees in his oil paintings and watercolors. Particularly during the 1860s and 1870s he painted flowers in wooded clearings and fields, in gardens, in jars and pots on windowsills, and in the hands of courting couples. His concentrated use of floral images in these decades coincides with the height of the popularity of the so-called language of flowers in the United States, and I believe he sometimes intended them to express the specific symbolic meanings of that genre.

As discussed in my article in the October issue of ANTIQUES, the language of flowers was part of popular culture in Europe and the Americas in the years between 1835 and 1880.(1) It was promoted by scores of small books that were intended as gifts for women and in which were detailed the specific meanings given to common flowers. In this article, I will examine Homer's works in this light.

Homer's illustrations for Harper's Weekly and other publications in the 1860s and 1870s often included flowers and plants. Sometimes the title or accompanying text proves that these elements were included for their symbolic meanings, as a complement to the narrative. For example, in the wood engraving in Figure 3, entitled Tenth Commandment, a young man gazes longingly at two women kneeling in prayer. We know from the title that the young man is in fact coveting his neighbor's wife (or perhaps his neighbors' wives). Appropriately, the image is framed by a morning-glow vine, a symbol of affection in the language of flowers. Likewise, Homer's frontispiece for John Esten Cooke's 1866 novel, Surry of Eagle's Nest; or, The Memoirs of a Staff-officer Serving in Virginia [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], uses plants symbolically. The illustration shows Lieutenant Colonel Surry standing in a wood beside a seated young woman. Two pine boughs are carefully placed on the ground in front them, one lavish with evergreen needles, the other stripped of its foliage. Pine was the symbol of affection through adversity, as the color remains in the leaves throughout the cold winter months. The image illustrates the chapter in which Colonel Surry takes leave from his unit to revisit the Oaks, the home of May Beverly and her father. Much has happened since his first visit in April of 1861:

Then I was a gay and ardent youth, on fire with the coming conflict, and reveling in dreams of glory and romance. Now I was a weary, dusty soldier, with clanking sabre and dingy uniform.(2)

During a walk in the woods, he asks May if she "never forgot [him] - never lost sight of the poor soldier, living only for you?" "Never! never!...I have loved and love you only," she replies. Encouraged, Surry asks Colonel Beverly for his daughter's hand in marriage, only to discover that she has promised to marry another.

The pine boughs so carefully placed in the illustration now take on symbolic meaning: Surry, despite the hardship of the war, has earned the evergreen needles associated with his constancy; May has not (although the closed pinecones, symbolic of virginity, alert the reader to her essential goodness). Later in the story, using the language of flowers herself, May sends Colonel Surry an envelope containing nothing but a single blossom of autumn primrose - as a prearranged signal that her situation has changed and she is free to many him.(3)

In his Civil War painting Home, Sweet Home (Pl. IV) Homer again uses plant imagery to underscore the meaning of the picture. Here he prominently places a holly bush flail of berries outside the soldiers' tent.(4)

Like many plants, holly has had numerous meanings over the centuries, ever since the Romans included holly branches as symbolic greenery during winter Saturnalia feasts. Since the Middle Ages, the sharply pointed leaves and bloodred berries have been used as symbols of Christs birth and death. English folklore, based on Pliny, advised that holly plantings could shield a house from fire or storms, particularly from lightning.(5) In the case of Home, Sweet Home, the bush may represent the soldiers' only bulwark against the storms of war gathering around them. They may even be hoping for protection from the "fateful lightning" that Juliet Ward Howe (1819-1910) described in her "Battle Hymn of the Republic," written in 1861.

Victorian authors also variously identified holly with domestic happiness and foresight. The bloodred cloth deliberately placed over the bush in the painting, blocking the men's view of it, suggests that they are trying to ignore these sentiments. Such an interpretation makes the idea that they are hearing the distant singing of "Home, Sweet Home" even more trenchant, for despite their efforts they cannot avoid contemplating both what they have left and what is surely to come.

In the important painting Prisoners from the Front (Pl. XI) of 1866, a pine bough has been placed over one of the rifles the Confederate prisoners have surrendered to Major General Francis Channing Barlow (1834-1896), while a holly sprout and a pine shrub entwine behind him. What might Homer have meant by these details? Greek mythology suggested two meanings for pine to the authors of flower language books: constancy and pity. Pitys was a nymph desired by the satyr Pan, but she loved another, and in order to save her from Pan's lustful grasp Apollo turned her into a pine tree. The pine thus became a symbol for her constancy and the transliteration of her name. One Victorian author suggested the following verse, which is quite appropriate to the image of Prisoners from the Front, as the sentiment conveyed by a pine branch: