Waterhouse painted The Soul of the Rose in 1908. It is an oil on canvas about 88 by 59 cm and is in a private collection. It is one of his best-loved pictures, and it also goes by the name My Sweet Rose.
Two possible poems
The title is loosely derived from the medieval Romance of the Rose, the dream poem that Chaucer translated from the French of Guillaume de Lorris. It is also said to echo a line from Tennyson's Maud (1855), in which the poet waits in a garden for his beloved: and the soul of the rose went into my blood. Waterhouse does not illustrate either poem. He takes the line and the old symbol of the rose as love and makes a picture of his own.
What she is doing
A woman leans forward to breathe in a pink rose, her eyes half-closed. She wears a blue-green robe woven with gold motifs, and her red-gold hair is pinned up with small pearl-like ornaments. Climbing roses fill the wall behind her, and a red-roofed house with arched windows rises over the garden wall. Commentators note that her expression is not simply pleasure. She seems to hope the scent will reveal something, as though the flower could tell her a secret.
Little-known facts
- Waterhouse returned to roses again and again in these years, including the 1908 Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May.
- The walled rose garden recalls the enclosed garden of the Romance of the Rose, where the rose itself stands for the lover's goal.
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