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Still Life with Flowers in a Glass Vase

Oil on canvas
12 1/8 x 10 1/8 inches
After 1864

Sensorium: Scented Visions
Smellscapes

The odiferous objects depicted in paintings can provide rich historical and cultural information. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century, for instance, that technological advances allowed fresh flowers and fruits to become accessible year-round and worldwide, radically altering people’s olfactory expectations. Paintings can also be windows into the smellscapes of distant times and places. Some of the earliest recorded descriptions of the colonial contact zones in the Americas, for example, focused on the distinctive and unfamiliar smells of environs similar to Edward Gay’s South Carolina Landscape.

 

As published in:
Romantic Spirits: Nineteenth Century Paintings of the South from the Johnson Collection

As exhibited in: 
Romantic Spirits: Nineteenth Century Paintings of the South, 2013–2016, Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina; Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Alabama; Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia; Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina; Blowing Rock Art & History Museum, North Carolina; Columbus Museum of Art, Georgia; Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee

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