Romantic Gentleman
These artists portrayed classic notions of
romantic beauty in their work often with
chivalrous knights and graceful maidens.
The subject matter is often an ideal
portrayal of a woman with an emphasis on
nature and morality and the artists looked
to literature and mythology for their
inspirations. Flowers laden with symbolism
bloom abundantly in the artworks of the
Pre-Raphaelites. The founder of the
Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood (group of
artists) was the artist John Everett Millais. In
his painting Ophelia (1852) he uses oils to
create an artwork imbued with naturalistic
elements and rich in Floriography. In his
painting, he depicts the tragic heroine
Ophelia as a drowned stargazer floating
amid the flowers she describes in Act IV,
Scene V of Hamlet. From this, we can
definitely say that Floriography has always
had a romantic connection.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)
Lady Montagu was married to the British
ambassador of Turkey and she was known
for her essays and letters from her travels to
the Ottoman Empire, where the language of
flowers finds its roots in Ottoman Turkey,
specifically in the court of Constantinople
at the time. The court of Constantinople
was apparently obsessed with tulips during
the first half of the 18th Century, then this
obsession spread to Victorian England in
the 19th Century where this beautiful floral
language came into being just at the time
when the craze for botany during the
Victorian era was in full bloom. During this
era, the Victorian Pre-Raphaelites which
were a group of 19th-century painters and
poets who aimed to revive the purer art if
the late medieval period also captured the
beauty of flowers in art.
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