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Members are invited to join us for a talk by Olive Maggs about women and the visual language of flowers within Victorian painting.
To tie in with our latest exhibition, Scented Visions: Smell in Art 1850-1915 this talk focuses on the sense of sight. Victorian painting held a strong association between women and flowers. Meanings have been given to flowers since the Renaissance, but the Victorian craze for floriography further developed flowers as a coded means of communicating ideas, often about the virtues of women.
Flowers were regarded as possessing the virtues expected of women… beauty, delicacy, purity, fragility. In paintings, flowers communicated a wealth of meaning, often complex and seldom static. This talk gives us clues into the forgotten Victorian art of speaking through flowers in many of our best loved Victorian paintings.
Refreshments will be served at 10.15am followed by the talk from 10.30 – 11.30am.
Please email members@wattsgallery.org.uk with any questions about this event.
Olive Maggs is an independent art historian and lecturer. Formerly a freelance educator at Watts Gallery, Olive now specialises in the history of women artists and women in art in the nineteenth and twentieth century.