Rose Paintings: 12 Famous Works to Know
The most famous rose paintings hide a thorn inside the beauty. Van Gogh painted roses in the weeks before he died, one Victorian smothered an emperor’s guests under falling petals, and the Dutch masters slipped a single rose beside a wilting bloom to whisper about death. Here are twelve to know, and where to see them.
No flower carries more meaning than the rose: love, beauty, the Virgin, and the shortness of it all. Painters have used it to seduce, to mourn and to show off sheer skill. The twelve below run from a jewel like Dutch bouquet to a room drowning in petals.
Use this as a quick tour:
The moderns: Van Gogh, Fantin-Latour and Redon, the rose as feeling.
The Dutch masters: van Huysum, Ruysch and Bosschaert, beauty with a warning.
The storytellers: Waterhouse, Rossetti and Alma-Tadema, the rose as myth.
Where to see them: a museum list at the end, grouped by city.
Vincent van Gogh, Roses
Vincent van Gogh painted a series of large flower pieces in 1890, including these pale roses in a green vase, in the last weeks before he left the asylum at Saint Remy.
The roses were once fresh pink, but the red pigment has faded over time, so they now read as white. Van Gogh painted them as a hopeful, healing subject, calm after a hard winter.
It hangs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Painted so close to the end of his life, the thick, tender roses feel like a quiet goodbye.
Henri Fantin-Latour, Roses
Henri Fantin-Latour painted roses more than almost any artist, hundreds of quiet studies of soft pink and cream blooms in a bowl against a plain dark ground. He made them from the 1860s on.
Fantin-Latour was friends with the avant garde but painted flowers in a calm, traditional way, and the English adored them. His name is now even given to a real garden rose. It is the still life at its most tender.
His roses hang in the Musee d’Orsay and across Britain. Simple and warm, they are among the most loved flower paintings ever made.
John William Waterhouse, The Soul of the Rose
John William Waterhouse painted The Soul of the Rose in 1908, a young woman in a red gown pressing her face to the roses climbing a sunlit wall, breathing them in with closed eyes. It is late Pre-Raphaelite painting.
The title comes from a poem by Tennyson. Waterhouse makes the whole picture about scent and longing, a moment of pure sensual absorption in the flower.
It is held in a private collection and often loaned. It has become one of the most reproduced romantic images of a woman and a rose.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Roses of Heliogabalus
Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted The Roses of Heliogabalus in 1888, showing a decadent Roman emperor smothering his dinner guests under a cascade of pink rose petals dropped from the ceiling.
The old story claimed the guests were buried and suffocated for the emperor’s amusement. To paint the petals accurately, Alma-Tadema had fresh roses sent from the French Riviera every week through winter.
It is held in a private collection. Beautiful and sinister at once, it is the rose turned into a weapon, luxury as slow murder.
Jan van Huysum, Roses in a Bouquet
Jan van Huysum was the most admired flower painter of the early 1700s, and his lavish bouquets always centre on full, heavy roses among the tulips and dew drops.
Van Huysum was famously secretive, refusing pupils and hiding his methods. His roses glow against light backgrounds, painted in oil so fine you can count the petals.
His work hangs in the Rijksmuseum and the National Gallery in London. The rose is always the queen of his overflowing arrangements.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Roses
Pierre-Auguste Renoir loved painting roses and returned to them all his life, loose warm blooms spilling from a vase in soft light. He said flowers let him experiment freely with colour.
Renoir treated a rose as an excuse to play, laying on pinks and reds with a full Impressionist brush. Late in life, crippled by arthritis, he still painted them with the brush strapped to his hand.
His roses hang across the world’s museums. For Renoir the flower was pure pleasure, colour and warmth with nothing sad about it.
Odilon Redon, Roses
Odilon Redon painted glowing roses late in life, floating in a vase against soft dreamlike grounds. After decades of dark charcoal fantasies he burst into colour, and flowers led the way. This is Symbolist painting.
Redon’s roses are not quite real. They hover and glow, more like a vision or a memory of flowers than a study from the garden.
His flower pieces hang in the Musee d’Orsay and beyond. For Redon the rose was a door out of the everyday, into pure colour and dream.
Rachel Ruysch, Roses and Flowers
Rachel Ruysch was one of the most successful painters of her age, and around 1700 she filled dark dramatic bouquets with heavy roses, drooping blooms and hidden insects.
Ruysch worked into her eighties and sold her flower pieces for more than many Rembrandts. A wilting rose beside a fresh one was her quiet reminder of death, beauty and decay in one vase.
Her work hangs in the Rijksmuseum and across Europe. She was one of the great women artists of the Dutch age, and her roses are among the finest ever painted.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Venus Verticordia
Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted Venus Verticordia around 1866, the goddess of love surrounded by a dense wall of roses and honeysuckle, holding an apple and a golden arrow. She is all beauty and danger.
Rossetti had the real roses delivered daily to paint them true, and grumbled at how much they cost. The flowers stand for love that is both irresistible and destructive.
It hangs at the Russell Cotes gallery in Bournemouth. Rossetti, a founder of the Pre-Raphaelites, made the rose the emblem of a love that could ruin you.
Ambrosius Bosschaert, Roses in a Bouquet
Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder was one of the first great Dutch flower painters, and around 1620 he set precise, jewel like roses and tulips in glass vases on a ledge.
Bosschaert combined flowers that bloom in different seasons, so his bouquets never truly existed. A single rose, perfect but already opening too far, hinted at how fast beauty passes.
His paintings hang in the Mauritshuis in The Hague and beyond. The rose sits at the heart of a perfect, impossible arrangement.
Edouard Manet, Roses
In his final illness, around 1882, Edouard Manet painted a series of small flower pieces friends brought to his bedside, including a few loose roses in a clear glass of water.
Too weak for big canvases, Manet caught these blooms in quick fresh strokes. They are among the last and most touching things he ever painted, life at his side as he faded.
They hang in the Musee d’Orsay and other collections. A handful of roses in a glass became the great modern painter’s farewell.
Gustave Courbet, Roses
Gustave Courbet, the great realist, turned to flowers in the 1860s, painting full thickly worked bouquets of roses and garden blooms against a dark ground.
Courbet built his roses with a palette knife, physical and solid, the opposite of a delicate Dutch study. Even a flower, for him, was something real and weighty. It is the still life made muscular.
His flower paintings hang in museums including the Getty. Courbet proved a rose could be painted with the same earthy force as a rock or a wave.
Questions people ask about rose paintings
What does a rose mean in a painting? Love and beauty above all, but also the Virgin Mary, and, beside a wilting bloom, the shortness of life. It is the most symbolic flower in art.
Why do Van Gogh roses look white? He painted them pink, but the red pigment has faded over more than a century, so the flowers now read as white or pale green.
What is happening in The Roses of Heliogabalus? A decadent Roman emperor drops a ceiling full of rose petals on his guests. The old story says they were smothered for his amusement.
Who painted the most famous roses? Henri Fantin-Latour, who made hundreds of them, along with the Dutch masters Jan van Huysum and Rachel Ruysch.
Did artists paint real roses or from memory? Often from life. Rossetti and Alma-Tadema had fresh roses delivered daily, even shipping them from the Riviera in winter to get the colour exactly right.
Where to see them
Musee d’Orsay, Paris: Fantin-Latour Roses, Manet flower pieces and Redon roses.
National Gallery of Art, Washington: Van Gogh Roses.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: van Huysum and Ruysch flower pieces.
Mauritshuis, The Hague: Bosschaert bouquets with roses.
Keep exploring
If the roses pulled you in, three more paths from here. Meet the forgotten women who shaped art in the old masters were women too, learn to read the hidden clues in famous canvases in seven secrets hidden in famous paintings, or start with the basics of still life painting.
One last thing. A rose is beautiful, and it is already dying. That double truth is why painters keep reaching for it, to hold love and loss in the same soft bloom. Twelve painters, one flower that always means more than it shows.