Smelling Flowers

From Watts’s Choosing (1864) to May Louise Greville Cooksey’s Maria Virgo (1915), images of women smelling flowers were by far the most popular mode of representing scent in British art and visual culture, 1850-1915. Watts’s Choosing was a pioneering example of this; there had been paintings that included women smelling flowers before, but as the main subject of the painting, it was seemingly unheard of. However, the convention later became so prosaic it often went unnoticed, and it coincided with the expectations of the day that women ‘look, smell, and act’ like flowers. This flower/woman metaphor only became more popular and widespread as the nineteenth-century progressed, with growing numbers of artists turning to “scented visions” as a conservative response to women’s increasingly active presence in public and political life.

Most paintings of women smelling flowers from circa 1850 to 1914 belonged to a broader trend for “eyes-closed” reverie images, that signalled an exclusion of the here and now—a scent-inspired inward-turn toward gendered experiences of memory, daydream, lust, and longing. Scent has, of course, a long association with the feminine—with sentiment, homemaking, and seduction, the privacy of the toilette and the intimacy of lovers—as well as with personal, womanly experiences of intuition, memory, and imagination. Indeed, most traditional female pursuits, such as cooking, cleaning, sewing, and caring, are associated with the lower senses of taste, touch, and smell. In this context, the conjunction of floral fragrance and female form in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paintings typically reinforces a traditional ideology of middle-class femininity in which women are associated with lovemaking and homemaking rather than the wage-earning of the growing class of financially independent, career-minded women.

The abundance of paintings and other visual images featuring this reverie motif forms a compelling body of evidence about nineteenth- and early twentieth-century constructions of femininity. Pictures of women inhaling floral scent (usually represented as a solitary activity) impart a variety of messages. Flowers can be shown to be smelled in different ways, and

interpretations of such images depend on subtle distinctions in the visual presentation of the olfactory experience. A variety of factors, such as the precise way in which the flower is held and its distance from the nose, as well as body posture, facial expression, open or closed eyes, clothes, and environment, have a significant bearing on the representation of femininity. Whether the female figure is shown daintily tilting the rose to her face, presenting the blossom to her lover, or lustily burying her nose into a lavish bloom, the simple gesture of smelling flowers can present different meanings, including eligibility for polite courtship, sexual impropriety, and the fantasy of sexual abandon. It can suggest pre-sexual innocence and a child’s inquisitiveness about the world—or the first awakening of sexual desire in a child. Likewise, paintings of women smelling flowers range from innocent pleasure—to unrefined sensuality, as one critic read Waterhouse’s The Shrine (1895).

According to art historian Lou Charnon-Deutsch, depictions of women smelling lilies hold echoes of the purity of the Virgin Mary, while “women smelling roses appear to have already savoured the perfume of love.” (1) Yet much depends upon the type of bloom, the manner of sniffing, and who is doing the deed. Visual interplay with the olfactory invited such a variety of symbolic attachments that nineteenth-century artists across countries, styles, and movements used this motif as a versatile sign of female sexuality representing anything from moral laxity to innocent chastity. In almost all cases, however, it conveys a traditional and passive view of femininity, and by the turn of the twentieth-century the motif was widely associated with female beauty in advertising and other popular culture.

Dr Christina Bradstreet This text accompanies the exhibition Scented Visions: Smell in Art 1850-1915 Watts Gallery, Compton. 15 May – 9 November 2025

Endnotes

1. Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000), 25.