Can scent form the basis of an artwork? Can there be a visual aesthetics of smell?
The Soul of the Rose by John William Waterhouse is a visual testament to intangible qualities we know and feel but cannot see – love, reverie (daydreaming), and, not least of all, beautiful fragrances.
By titling this early 20th century work The Soul of the Rose, Waterhouse can be seen to be hinting that he’s not as concerned specifically with scent alone but with the overall experience in all its dreamy complexity. Thus, in a more poetic reading per the title, the artist searches for the “soul” with the alluring images of a female figure lost in the sensuous experience of smell in a setting lush with nature, beauty, and romance; everything in this painting says “roses.”
Detail, George Frederic Watts, Portrait of Ellen Terry (‘Choosing’), 1864
A similar painting by G.F. Watts, titled Choosing (1864), a detail of which appears above, seeks to draw us in with an equally intriguing poetic meaning hiding under its botanical surface. G.F. Watts’s painting is a portrait, but it’s been understood as also a statement of the futility of trying to get painting to represent scent at all.
It’s been pointed out that the flower she is smelling is a camelia, and while visually impressive, the camellia flower has no natural scent. Perhaps Watts was making an insiders’ comment about some aspect of Ms. Terry’s character. For whatever reason, by titling the painting “Choosing,” the artist underlines the primary importance of the scentless camellia flower over the more fragrant flowers in the rest of the painting.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, another one of the Pre-Raphaelites, depicted dense arrangements of flowers surrounding sequestered female figures, aligning allure with the possibilities of scent. In his oil, A Vision of Flametta of 1878, Rosetti even uses the same color scheme in the woman as in the flowers, further associating the two.
Detail Dante Gabriel Rosetti, A Vision of Flametta, 1878.
John Singer Sargent perhaps does something similar in his Perfume of Ambergris, a painting we have looked at before. The whitish-gray smoke of the incense corresponds to the figure’s white inner garment exactly.
The smoke’s color in a sense could be said to tinge the whole painting in various shades of white and gray. Ambergris itself often takes the form of just such a white-gray substance. Its inexpensive substitute, an incense sold under the name “amber,” has a powdery, sweet, vanilla-like fragrance.
Smell has often been thought to be a particularly insubstantial sense, near impossible to describe, and therefore resistant to expression in art, literature, and music. Eighteenth-century theorists of art and beauty argued that the ‘proximate senses’ of smell, taste, and touch could never form the basis of lasting art.
Jean Louis Hamon Aurora (Dawn). 1864
In Hamon’s painting (above), the figure with the flower tipped to her nose almost appears to be sipping instead of smelling the contents.
Visually pairing the subtle and exquisite scent to fine wine or liqueur associates the more evanescent sense of smell with the more embodied one of taste (the sense of taste is even partly physical with touch upon the tongue). Hamon cleverly creates an amalgamated sensation-memory we are invited not only to see but to feel.
Flowers have a long association along these lines. Not for nothing do connoisseurs call the fragrance of a glass of wine its bouquet.
(No bad behavior for this gal, though. After all, she is not a woman but a goddess, specifically the mild and chaste classical deity known in antiquity as Aurora, personification of the dawn. Aside from the title and the toga, we know she’s a mythological being because she can stand on a cabbage without bending it or having any weight at all 😉
The Romantic poet John Keats notably rose to the challenge of conveying the feeling of being among fragrant wildflowers. It’s too dark for the speaker in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale to be able to see the flowers surrounding him, so he must identify (“guess”) them by their scents:
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
- Keats Ode to a Nightingale
Odilon Redon worked entirely in black and white until his marriage and the birth of his first child, after which he switched to pastels and oils exploding with color. In keeping with that spirit, in Woman with a Vase of Flowers (1903), the figure leans over a vase of brightly colored flowers, her head and neck bathed in shadow. Like many of the artist’s paintings of this theme, the image combines naturalistic details with a poetic, dream-like mood.
Odilon Redon, Woman with a Vase of Flowers (1903)
Detial Odilon Redon, Woman with a Vase of Flowers (1903)
If you’d like some instruction for your own flower painting, you might benefit from one of these videos: Pat Fiorello’s Vibrant Flowers reveals how her simple method can boost the vibrancy and glow of your floral paintings while aiding you to be more loose and expressive. Check it out here.
Vera Kavura’s Realistic Flowers in Pastel teaches how to create breathtaking paintings of flowers that not only grab the viewer’s attention, but also leave behind a lasting impression. Check it out here.
