The Rose Bower

This charming and sensitive study is thought to date from 1910, two years after Waterhouse completed two of his most popular works, The Soul of the Rose (Christie’s, New York, 28 October 2019, lot 206, $4,695,000) and Gather ye Rosebuds while ye May (Christie’s, London, 13 December 2022, lot 4, £966,000). In 1908, Waterhouse had begun with these paintings a six-year exploration of what we might call flower-women, a series of gorgeous, non-narrative paintings to which the present work belongs. In them, maidens carry flowers in vases, arrange them in their hair as they gaze into mirrors, or as in the present work, stand among them in gardens, inhaling their heady scent. Gather Ye Rosebuds while Ye May, among the earliest of these works, took its title from the Elizabethan poem To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time, which warned the ‘flower that smiles to-day,/To-morrow will be dying’. The celebration of beauty, shot through with the tension of its inevitable disappearance is an overarching theme of the series and Waterhouse's oeuvre more generally; the artist had associated women with the beauty, simplicity and ephemerality of flowers from the outset of his career. The Rose Bower is another celebration of the fleeting nature of youth and beauty, that ultimately owes much in its format to Rossetti.