Memoire Des Roses I

The roses depicted in this painting, Memoire des Roses I, are 'Glamis Castle' and ‘Boules de Neige’ (the white roses), 'The Prince' (the red roses) and 'Souvenir de la Malmaison' (the pink variety, named after the Empress Josephine's garden at Malmaison).

After discovering the world of old-fashioned roses and the fin de siecle atmosphere they exude, Paul Seaton began to grow them himself and became intimately acquainted with what he describes as “such olde worlde delights as blackspot, powdery mildew and thorns through the thumb”. He found painting flowers of this kind, and other garden and cut flowers, “a fascinating challenge in that one is constrained to work from the arrangement at lightning speed in order to catch the flowers before they fade or otherwise misbehave”.