A Rose a Day. No.1

This week my book ‘By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose’ is published in the UK by Oneworld. In the USA it’s published in November. So, every day for the next few weeks I will post a picture of a rose. You will discover that they are surprisingly various. I will also post the same image on my Instagram page : morleypsimon. But in this blog I will write a bit of information about the image to contextualize it.

So, here is today’s picture:

Jean-Marc Nattier, ‘Manon Balletti’ (1757), oil on canvas, 54x47cm. National Gallery, London.

Manon is wearing a ‘hundred-petalled’ rose, the Centifolia, Rosa centifolia, at the centre of her bodice as a ‘bosom flower’. Rosa centifolia was also known as the Cabbage Rose because the manner in which the petals interweave and their great number resembles a cabbage. The plant is shrubby with long drooping canes, and before the nineteenth century it was unique in having this round, globular flower comprised of numerous densely-overlapping petals. As you can see, the petals are usually pink, but sometimes they are white or dark purplish-red.

Rosa centfilia is a ‘sport’ - a chance mutation - and Rosa gallica, Rosa moschata, Rosa canina, and Rosa damascena were all participants in its parenting at some unspecfiable time and place. So, it can claim to be the most truly communally European rose, although conception occurred somewhere in the Near East. This rose also went by the aliases Holland Rose (on account of it being first cultivated in Europe by the Dutch), Provence Rose, and Rose de Mai. Why ‘Provence’? Because it was (and is still) grown in great numbers in the south of France for the perfume industry, especially around Grasse.

When I visited John Lewis department store on Oxford Street in London, on a rose hunt, I tried the then new Eau de Toilette ‘Rose N’Roses’ by Dior, which had been recently launched to coincide with Valentine’s Day, 2020, joining the six other Miss Dior rose-based perfumes (the first appeared in 1947). I asked the two sales’ assistants what specific type of rose was used for the perfume, and one of them replied, ‘the Grass Rose’, which threw me for a moment, until I realized she was referring to the Grasse Rose, that is, Rosa centifolia.  In the twelfth century, returning Crusaders may have carried knowledge of rose distillation back with them to Western Europe, although such knowledge could have arisen independently in Europe. Eventually, this rose became important ingredient for the Western perfume industry, and  Rosa centifolia remains today at the heart of a thriving business. Dior, Chanel, and Hermès all source their roses in Grasse. By the way, at John Lewis I also found a lovely red polyester Rosa centifolia, retailing at a very reasonable £8.00.

In a letter from May 1888, Vincent van Gogh, who had recently arrived in Arles, wrote of the painter Auguste Renoir to his brother Theo: ‘You will remember that we saw a magnificent garden of roses by Renoir. I was expecting to find subjects like that here….You would probably have to go to Nice to find Renoir’s garden again. I have seen very few roses here, though there are some, among them the big red roses called Rose de Provence.’ As a Dutchman, van Gogh would no doubt have been delighted to learn that the Rose de Provence is actually a ‘sport’ first nurtured in Europe by Dutch breeders. 

Here is what the National Gallery website says about this painting:

Maria Maddalena Balletti, known as Manon Balletti, was the daughter of Antonio Giuseppe Balletti, an actor in the Comédie Italienne. In contrast to her parents, aunt and brothers, who were successful actors and ballet masters, Manon appears not to have taken to the stage professionally, although she performed in amateur dramatics and was a keen amateur musician. Her brother Stefano was friends with the Venetian adventurer and author Giacomo Casanova.

By the age of 17 Manon was engaged to her music teacher, Charles-Francois Clément, who arranged music for the Comédie Italienne. When Casanova returned to Paris from Venice in January 1757, he and Manon fell in love. Manon broke off her engagement to Clément, which left Casanova in rather a bind as he had no intention of marrying her himself. After a three-year on-off courtship, during which Casanova promised Manon’s mother on her deathbed that he would marry her daughter, the pair were still no closer to being wed and Casanova was involved with ladies elsewhere. Finally, in 1760, Manon wrote to Casanova to tell him that she had married M. Blondel, the king’s architect. A widower and father of two children, Blondel was 35 years older than Manon. After her three-year giddy courtship with Casanova, Blondel must have appeared to Manon and her family as the essence of dependability.

Manon asked Casanova to return her portrait, and he obliged, although he never returned her letters. We know that the portrait Casanova returned was a miniature so it cannot be this pastel portrait by Nattier. Nevertheless, it is tempting to suppose that Casanova may have commissioned it as he knew Nattier. According to Casanova, the artist was among the few portraitists who could produce a perfect likeness while at the same time adding an imperceptible beauty to the face.

Manon wears two violas in her hair or attached to her veil, which was a fashion introduced by Mme de Pompadour (official chief mistress of Louis XV) in the mid 1740s. In the language of flowers, violas or pansies (pensées in French) mean ‘thoughts of the beloved’. The rose on Manon’s breast is associated with love. It may also refer to her mother’s name: Rosa. The portrait is signed and dated 1757 and it may have been one of the eight family portraits in gilded wood frames recorded in Manon Balletti’s room in 1758.

There are also a number of other portraits of women by Nattier that closely resemble this one. There is a virtually identical portrait of Mlle Marsollier (sold at Sotheby’s New York, 28 January 1999), the main difference being a bow rather than a rose in the corsage. The essence of the composition, with eyes looking directly at the viewer, a striped muslin veil attached to a point near the crown of the head and draped over the shoulder of a monochrome dress decorated with one or more strings of pearls had been adopted by Nattier in his half-length portrait of Madame Dupleix de Bacquencourt, née Jeanne-Henriette de Lalleu (private collection) and then used again with variations for numerous subsequent portraits. Repetition allowed him to produce portraits more quickly and more cheaply than constantly inventing new compositions.

[i] Bumpus, J., Van Gogh’s Flowers (London: Phaidon, 1989), unpaginated, quoted with Plate 23.