Katie Faulkner, Courtauld Institute of Art

AHH New Voices Conference, York – 7th November 2009

Just in case it has somehow escaped your attention, 2009 is the bicentenary of

Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of

Species, on the 24th of November. This year has seen a several exhibitions, conferences

and publications about Darwin’s impact on the visual arts, not to mention the opening of

the new Darwin Centre building at the Natural History Museum and Origin, a new

Darwin biopic starring Paul Bettany. Currently it seems impossible to escape from the

themes of evolution and natural selection, but it is only recently that art historians have

begun to make connections have been made between Darwin and Darwinism and

Victorian visual culture. It should be noted that the study of Darwin’s influence in the

field of nineteenth-century English literature, initiated by Gillian Beer’s groundbreaking

book, Darwin’s Plots published in 1983 (a new edition was published this year) is more

established. Scholars of British nineteenth-century art, Alison Smith and Colin Trodd

have explored the influence of evolutionary theory on the art of G.F. Watts, in particular

ideas of progress and regression. Gowan Dawson and Jane Munro have explored how

Darwinism came to be tainted its by association with the poetry of William Morris,

Walter Pater and Algernon Charles Swinburne. So far, the majority of scholars have

focused on the connection between Darwin’s theories on geological time scales and the

theory of natural and sexual selection in animals rather than his botany. As Jonathan

Smith has shown, however, Darwin’s botanical studies threatened traditionally held

notions of beauty and sexuality. In particular, John Ruskin felt he and his aesthetic ideals

were under attack by Darwin and his followers. This paper will explore the critique

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Ruskin set up in his botanical writings against Darwin and his popularizers. I will explore

Ruskin’s anxieties with Darwin’s botany in relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting

Venus Verticordia, of 1864-8. Rossetti’s art is often characterised as representing desire,

but Venus Verticordia can particularly be seen as a nexus of Darwinian versus Ruskinian

ideals of aesthetics and desire.1

Plants were the main focus of Darwin’s experiments at Down House between

1862 and 1880. Darwin published six major botanical works, which were widely

reviewed and commented on.2 Darwin’s botanical studies were significant for

evolutionary theory in several ways. Firstly, and on a general level, Darwin’s botany

broke down the rigid boundaries between animal and plant life. For example, in his work

on plant movement, Darwin equated the responses of plants to stimuli such as light, heat

or irritants to the very basic reflex actions of animals. Secondly, as I will explain,

Darwin’s botanical studies further built the case for natural selection.3

Darwin’s observational experiments into the cross and self-fertilisation of plants

formed a central strand of his theory of natural selection. His theories about plant

fertilisation date back to Darwin’s first botanical book the Fertilisation of Orchids

(1862), but he gave the topic a full and detailed explanation in Cross and Self-

Fertilisation of Plants, published in 1876. This book presented the results of Darwin’s

1 Venus Verticordia was commissioned by J. Mitchell of Bradford in 1863 or 1864. It was never exhibited
in Rossetti’s lifetime although accounts of the painting were published in the Athaneum, 21 October, 1865,
456, and in Algernon Swinburne’s Notes from the Royal Academy of 1868 (pages!). It was first exhibited in
Birmingham in 1891 and has been exhibited several times since, most recently in Exposed: The Victorian
Nude, 2001 Tate Britain. It is now part of the permanent collection of the Russell Coates Museum in
Bournemouth.
2 Jonathan Smith, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2006), 137.
3 Smith, 2006, 140-2.

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comparative experiments on the effects of cross and self-fertilisation in fifty-seven

different species of plants. In almost all cases, crossed plants, that is those which were

fertilised with pollen from another plant, had ‘an extraordinary advantage in height,

weight and fertility, over the self fertilised plants.’ Crossed plants were also endowed

with a ‘greater constitutional vigour’ and survived better when subjected to severe

competition from other species of plants in comparison plants which had self-fertilised.4

This was due the lack of variety and diversity in the successive generations of self-

fertilised plants, which Darwin likens to the abhorrent practice of close relatives

marrying.5

Darwin also wrote extensively on the processes of fertilisation. The most

important stage was the transportation of pollen from the anthers to the stigma of the

same flower, by insects, before distributing the pollen to the surrounding flowers. Darwin

explained that the plants had evolved to produce large and brightly coloured flowers,

which were conspicuous to insects and encouraged them into the nectary, picking up

pollen on their way. On the same principle, fruits are coloured to strongly contrast with

green foliage to be conspicuous to birds, which eat the fruit and disseminate the seeds.6

Jonathan Smith points out that Darwin never fully explicated the aesthetic

ramifications of his work on cross-fertilisation and the pollination of flowers by insects.

This was left to his popularizers, most notably Grant Allen. In 1877, Allen

published his theory of ‘physiological aesthetics’ in a book of the same

4 Charles Darwin, The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom, (London: John
Murray, 1876) 253-6 and 285-291.
5 Darwin, On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects and

on the good effects of Intercrossing, (London: John Murray, 1862), 359-60.

6 Darwin, 1876, 371-2.

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name. Allen’s physiological aesthetics synthesized Darwin’s work on

sexual selection in animals and the evolutionary relationship between

flowers and insects with the physiological psychology of Herbert

Spencer and Alexander Bain, and Herman von Helmholtz’s studies into

the physiology of sight and hearing. Allen’s main argument was that

aesthetic feelings have a physiological basis and are the result of many

generations of natural and sexual selection; therefore, he claimed,

aesthetic feelings were not unique to humans.7Allen went as far as to

say that insects had particular aesthetic tastes, explaining that

‘creatures which pass all their lives in the search for bright flowers

must almost inevitably come to feel pleasure in the perception of

brilliant colours.’8

The main implication of Allen’s synthesis of Darwin’s botany with

physiological aesthetics, meant that the brilliant colours and beautiful

scents of flowers and fruits were not simply for the delight of humans

but were characteristics which had evolved specifically to attract

insects and birds to the plant.9 The ‘beauty’ imputed to plants by man,

Allen argued, was no more and no less than means of the reproduction

and survival of the species.10 This particularly utilitarian view of the

beauty of plants was not accepted by all and deeply unsettled many

critics and writers, in particular John Ruskin.

7Smith, 2006, 161.

8 Quoted in Smith, 2006, 163.
9 Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, (New York: D Appleton and Co, 1877), 155.

10 M.M.Mahood, The Poet as Botanist, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 4.

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Proserpina, published in parts between 1876 and 1884, is a

slightly scattered collection of Ruskin’s botanical writing. It is a

confused and confusing text, due in no small part to Ruskin’s gradually

increasing mental illness. The origins of many of the concerns

expressed in Proserpina can be traced back to the 1840s and the early

volumes of Modern Painters. In the second preface to Modern Painters,

for example, he distinguishes between an botanist’s and an artist’s

perception of a flower, the botanist, ‘counts the stamens, and affixes a

name, and is content,’ whereas an artist considers, ‘each of [the

flower’s] attributes as an element of expression.’11 Proserpina can be

read as a critique and rejection of not only of botanical science but also

of Darwinism. As Smith has pointed out, Ruskin’s dissent from Darwin

was strictly on botanical grounds; he was in fact surprisingly receptive

to evolutionary theory in general. Ruskin was disturbed by the blurring

of the boundaries between the animal and plant kingdoms in Darwin’s

The Power of Movement in Plants and Insectivorous Plants, but above

all it was the utilitarian connection Darwin made between the beauty

of plants and flowers and sexual reproduction that repulsed and

alarmed the art critic.

We can see a precursor of Ruskin’s resistance to Darwin’s

sexualization of plants in a letter exchange between Ruskin and Dante

Gabriel Rossetti concerning Rossetti’s painting Venus Verticordia

11 Cited in Mahood, 151.

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(1864-8):

I purposefully used the word “wonderfully” painted about those

flowers.
They were wonderful to me, in their realism; awful – I can use no
other
word – in their coarseness: showing enormous power; showing
certain
conditions of non-sentiment which underlie all you are doing - now…

As Ruskin’s reaction to Venus Verticordia shows, the painting was

highly provocative, not least because of the disquieting combination of

symbolic attributes selected by Rossetti. Robert Upstone has

interpreted Ruskin’s letter as an objection to the ‘overt

sensuality of the picture, and by implication the decadence of

Rossetti’s Cheyne Walk existence’.73 It has traditionally been assumed

that the word ‘coarseness’ refers to the figure’s nudity. I would argue

that rather that Ruskin attributes the ‘awful coarseness’ and

‘enormous power’ of the painting directly to the flowers, which

assumed such importance that he rechristened the work ‘Flora’.12 This

suggests that Ruskin’s disgust was not only directed towards the

decadence and sensuality of Rossetti’s personal life, but also perhaps

towards the representation of the flowers in the painting, which I

suggest could have been seen as a visual encapsulation of the

processes of sexual selection and cross-fertilisation described in

Darwin’s botanical works by a late nineteenth-century viewer.

12See letters from John Ruskin to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Denmark Hill, 1865, Letters of John Ruskin, vol.
1, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 36, E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds), (London:
George Allen, 1906), 489-91. Griselda Pollock also suggests that the it was the flowers that most disturbed
Ruskin, see Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference (1988), (London: Routledge, 2003), 190-93.

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The system of classification and modes of representation of

flowers in Proserpina were devised by Ruskin as a poet-artist, not as a

botanist. Ruskin devised his own highly idiosyncratic classification and

nomenclature system, which was completely at odds with the

taxonomy of botany. It is based on Greek mythology and considers the

expressive and moral attributes of the plant as opposed to bare

scientific facts. He believed these Greek names would be more ‘vivid

and vital’ aids to understanding the nature of the plants than modern

Latin names, which he believed were ‘apt to be founded on unclean

and debasing association, so that to interpret them is to the defile the

reader’s mind.’13

Ruskin also developed his own method for drawing flowers.

Conventionally and historically, the purpose of botanical illustration is

to accurately record and clearly display the distinctive characteristics

each part of the plant, providing an exemplary specimen to aid

recognition and classification. The different parts of the plant are

clearly labeled. The inside and outside of a plant is exposed to view

through dissection, which is most often represented graphically

through cross-section. In the illustrations to Darwin’s Fertilisation of

Orchids and Self and Cross-Fertilisation of Plants, the sexual organs of

the plants, the stamens, anthers and ovaries are clearly displayed, as

we can see in this first figure from Fertilisation of Orchids. We are not
John Ruskin, Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers, (1875-1886), Volume 1, published in The
13

Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 25, E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds), (London: George
Allen, 1906), 201. All subsequent quotes are from this edition.

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shown the whole plant or even the whole flower, but rather the

individual structures of the nectary and pollinium, which are shown in

section. This clear depiction of what Ruskin called ‘the grostesque

seed-producer portions’ show Darwin’s interest in how the structure of

the plant ensured cross-pollination. This is even clearer in this

illustration from Forms of Flowers, published in 1877. The petals and

calyx of the European loosestrife have been stripped away so the

stigma and anthers are clearly visible. The dotted lines show the

direction the bees must carry the pollen in to make a successful ‘union’

between two plants. This went completely against Ruskin’s principles

of botanical drawing; he felt strongly that plants should not be

dissected. Many of the illustrations in Prosperina depict the whole

plant, for example this drawing of the Purple Wreathwort. It is a

noticeable tendency in Proserpina that the sexual organs of the plants

are not visible. Ruskin manipulates his reader’s understanding of the

structure of the plant by choosing drawing his specimens from

unconventional viewpoints. In this illustration showing the four stages

of the life of a young primrose, the flower is seen from below, rather

than above or face on, so that the sexual organs of the plant are

hidden from view.

Although William Rossetti joked that his brother was no botanist,

the presentation of the plants, especially the honeysuckle, in Venus

Verticordia, is perhaps closer to scientific botanical illustration than

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Ruskin’s coy drawings.14 Rather than painting an amorphous mass of

flowers and foliage, Rossetti has carefully painted each individual

honeysuckle bloom, presenting the flowers from multiple angles and

showing how it joins the stem. He also shows the stages of the opening

of the flower, from the tight dark red buds to the flamboyantly, fully

open golden blooms, with the stamens and anthers clearly displayed.

Like one of Ruskin’s botanists, we could count the stamens, affix a

name and be content. We can also see the honeysuckle berries, which

in reality appear after the plant has flowered. By showing the blooms

and berries on the plant at the same time, Rossetti is working in a

similar mode to scientific botanical illustration, which often shows all

stages of the plants growth and reproductive cycle at once.

This simultaneous representation of leaf, bud, bloom and berry

allows us to examine the way the form of the honeysuckle has evolved

to maximize its chances of survival. As Grant Allen explains the bright

red and yellow blooms with their ‘brilliant stamens’, set against the

dark green of the leaves had evolved specifically due to their ‘special

effect upon the animal organs’ of sight. Rossetti was well aware of the

attractiveness of honeysuckle to bees, writing a ballad, Chimes, on this

subject: ‘A honey-cell's in the honeysuckle / And the honey-bee knows

it well.’15. The bright colours and sweet smell of the honeysuckle give it

14INSERT REF FROM WMR

15In his notes to the 1911 edition of his brother’s poem, William Michael Rossetti explains the sections of
Chimes, which concern the bee and the honeysuckle as a sketched metaphor for ‘love-making, followed by
desertion.’ See The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, (London: Ellis, 1911), 227.

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a particular erotic significance in Rossetti’s poetry and painting.

Although the butterflies in Venus Verticordia are not shown literally

gathering nectar from the honeysuckle, the butterfly resting on the

stamen-like arrow is suggestive of this process. Likewise, the

butterflies drawn to Venus’ halo seem inescapably attracted to her

bright beauty.

For Darwin and Grant Allen, the distinctive shape and colour of the

honeysuckle blooms was a sign that the plant was highly evolved. In

contrast, Ruskin found the irregularity and asymmetry of the

honeysuckle flowers disturbing. Rossetti’s friend Graham Robertson

jested at Ruskin’s outburst:

What does that extraordinary Ruskin mean when he speaks of the

“coarseness” of the flowers? … I suppose he is reflecting upon
their morals, but I never heard a word breathed against the
perfect respectability of the honeysuckle. Of course roses have
got themselves talked about from time to time.16

It was precisely the moral character of the honeysuckle that concerned

Ruskin. Far from perfectly respectable, he categorized the honeysuckle

as a creeping climber, with feminine qualities, especially caprice. Due

to its complex and ‘licentious’ structure, Ruskin considered the

honeysuckle to be doubtful in disposition17 Ruskin’s aspersions on the

moral character of the honeysuckle exemplify the way he saw diversity

in all plants. For Darwin diversity was the highest and best result of
16 Letter from Graham Robertson to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, published in Letters from Graham Robertson,
Kerrison Preston (ed), (London: H. Hamilton, 1953), 398-9.
17 Ruskin, Proserpina, 481. Ruskin also likens serpents to ‘a honeysuckle, with a head put on,’ in

Deucalion, (1875-1883), The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 26, E.T. Cook and Alexander
Wedderburn (eds), (London: George Allen, 1906), 306.

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evolution. One of the advantages of cross-fertilisation was the

continual diversification of the species, making it increasingly

ingenious its means of survival. Ruskin took the opposite view,

diversity was the lowest and most despised result of evolution, the

irregular and diverse blooms of the honeysuckle were ‘fallen flowers’ in

his eyes, and signs of regression and degeneration rather than

progress. The more evolved a flower became the further away it

moved from the regularity of form and purity of colour of Ruskin’s

idealized floral archetypes.18

Rosetti’s clear display of the stamens, the bright colours and his

detailed rendering of their complex irregular shapes of the

honeysuckle flowers bring to mind passages of Grant Allen:

A moments consideration will show us that a bright patch of colour in the midst of
greens and greys will give a very pungent and special stimulation to a particular
area in the eye. Hence those flowers which possessed such patched in the
neighbourhood of their stamens and pistils would be readily discriminated by
insects and birds. So, in the midst of the prevalent green of vegetable life, we find
that patches of red, yellow, blue and orange are developed around the floral organs
of reproduction, as an aid to cross-fertilization…19

It was this association between the beauty of the flower and reproduction and fertilization

that disturbed Ruskin above all. As we have seen, for Darwin and Allen, the

flower was the means to an end, the end being the seed. The flower

had evolved to stimulate and attract insects to its nectary and in order

to spread its pollen to other plants, thus continuing its genetic

information in the species. Ruskin directly denied and contradicted

18 Mahood, 170.
19 Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 155.

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this: ‘the flower exists for its own sake, - not for the fruit’s sake. The

production of the fruit is an added honour to it – it is granted

consolation to us for its death. But the flower is the end of the seed, -

not the seed of the flower.’ The flower was the purest expression of a

plant’s essential characteristics, but the glory of the flower was in this

purity and beauty, not in the continuation of the species. 20

In Venus Verticordia, the beauty of the flowers is inescapably

connected to the beauty of the figure of Venus. There is a strong visual

connection between Venus’s body and the flowers, as commented on

by the poet Algernon Swinburne: ‘her glorious bosom seems to exult

and expand as the roses on either side of it.’21 The rose and

honeysuckle blooms closely surround the figure, pressing against her

bare skin, completely covering the lower half of her body and evoking

a tactile sensation of compression and perhaps interpenetration. We

could go as far as to say it is difficult to imagine where the human

body ends and the vegetation begins. This blurred boundary between

woman and plant is especially evident where the strands of the

luxuriant hair fall over and into the rosebush behind. Whilst the

connection between flowers and female sexuality is something we

often take for granted, I want to modify this connection slightly. If

feminine beauty is analogous to the beauty of the flowers, then

feminine beauty can also be analysed along the utilitarian lines of Allen
20Ruskin, Proserpina, 249-250.
21Algernon Charles Swinburne, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868, (London: John Hotten,
1868), 49.

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and Darwin. As William Boyd Dawkin’s commented in his review of the

Descent of Man: ‘Venus is the creative power of the world, and… the

mysterious reproduction, with the passions that belong to it, [is] the

dominant form of life.’22 According to the laws of sexual selection, the

flowers and Rossetti’s Venus are beautiful in order to appeal to a mate

or insect.

In the majority of interpretations, generally it should be said from

male commentators, Venus Verticordia has been recognized as an

emblem of the dangerous female beauty. This is especially clear in

psychoanalytic readings of Rossetti, for example, J.B. Bullen

categorises all of Rossetti’s ‘stylized’ female figures as essentially

images of desire created by the male libido. As such these images are

dominated by anxieties related to the coherence of male selfhood as

reflected in the female. For Bullen, it is male creativity that is at

stake.23 Griselda Pollock develops this reading, taking into account the

instability of the image, which vacillates between ‘a maternal image

and an erotic image of cold ruthless domination.’24 Pollock goes on to

explain the conflation of woman and beauty in terms of fetishistic

psycho-drama through which we encounter sexual difference.

According to Pollock, the power of the nude female to signify male

22 William Boyd Dawkins, ‘Darwin on the Descent of Man’, Edinburgh Review, Vol. 134
(1871), 195-235, quoted in Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectibility, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 33.
23 J. B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear ad Desire in Painting, Poetry and Criticism, (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1998), 122-148.

24 Pollock, Vision and Difference, 190.

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desire is interrupted by the fragmented body, stylized face and blank

look, which together form a fetish object. These fetishistic signs

together signify the displacement of absence, allaying castration

anxieties caused by the exposure of a woman as non-man.25

It could be argued that by placing such importance on the flowers

in the painting, that my reading of Venus Verticordia, has focused on

the symbolic ‘fancy dress’ or fancy undress surrounding Rossetti’s

image of woman rather than the central psychoanalytic problematics

of ‘woman as visibly different, yet woman as fantasy, sign of masculine

desire.’ Pollock states that it is not the flowers themselves that are

important but rather the way they cover up yet draw attention to what

is absent, the phallus, and to the anxiety that this presence/absence

generates in the masculine producer/viewer. Although my essentially

iconographic approach may seem slightly at odds with a feminist

psychoanalytic critique, the issues of male power, desire and creativity

and female power, desire and agency, raised by the latter seem

important to the Darwinian context I have set up.

In the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, published

in 1871, Darwin stated that in the animal world sexual selection

depended on the choice of the female of the species, who would select

the most attractive male as a mate. Immediately anticipating the

disbelief of his male readers, Darwin admitted that this did give the

25 Pollock, Vision and Difference, 193.

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female ‘powers of discrimination and taste…which will at first seem

highly improbable’, but then proved this through his detailed

observations of animal behavior.26 As soon as Darwin begins to discuss

sexual selection in relation to humans, however, this power of choice is

given to men rather than women. Being strong and vigorous and the

male best able to provide for your future family does not mean that

you will be chosen by the female, but that you have the power to

choose the most attractive female. Darwin explained this by stating

that man is ‘more powerful in body, and in mind that woman…

therefore it is not surprising that he should have gained the power of

selection.’27

The power of selection is clearly at issue in The Descent. Darwin

was aware of the explosive potential of granting this power and agency

to human women, and was keen to neutralize this by reassuring his

reader that as a man he retained the civilized privilege of selecting his

wife, rather than vice-versa. Despite Darwin’s insistence on the

maintaining the nineteenth-century status quo of marriage and family

descent, the possibility of female agency in sexual selection raised

anxieties for the male reader. These anxieties can be mapped onto a

Darwinian reading of Venus Verticordia. As I have shown, the beauty of

the female figure can be equated with the beauty of the brightly

coloured and sweetly scented roses and honeysuckle flowers. Her

26 Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), (London: Penguin, 2004), 246.
27 Darwin, The Descent of Man, 665.

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beauty will make her attractive to a male. Her supreme beauty is

further affirmed by her possession of the golden apple, awarded to

Venus by Paris. As we have seen, the iconology of Venus Verticordia is

purposefully ambiguous, and this suggests that the Venus’ possession

of the golden apple can also be read as a symbol of her power to select

a mate. This reading, although highly disruptive to the highly regulated

and gendered roles involved in Victorian courtship and marriage,

seems to fit well with Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and the

agency he gives female animals in choosing a mate. Perhaps it was

partly this possibility lay behind Ruskin’s sense of the ‘awful…

enormous power’ of the flowers and the coarseness he saw in Venus

Verticordia. In Proserpina, he constantly emphasizes the purity and

virtue of his wayside flowers, but also the young women that he

imagines as his readers. The overt connection Darwin and Grant Allen

made between the beauty of the flowers and sexual reproduction

disgusted Ruskin. In a similar way the idea of an overtly sexually

available woman, with the power to select her own mate, ultimately

possessing creative power in the process of reproduction, would have

been supremely threatening to Ruskin and to most nineteenth-century

male viewer who was aware of Darwin’s theories of sexual selection. In

a reading of Venus Verticordia in a Darwinian context, Venus is the

creative power of the world, and it is her mysterious passions and

power over the process of reproduction, it suggests, that are the

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dominant form of life.

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