“There is no flower so purely decorative as the sunflower (…) it is so perfectly adaptable for decorative art (…) because its form is definite and perfect”.

Spoken by champion of the Aesthetic, Art for Art’s sake, movement, playwright and art critic Oscar Wilde. The ‘gaudy, leonine beauty’ of sunflowers became so synonymous with Oscar and the art movement, Punch magazine caricatured him as the embodiment of a sunflower. Such did this flower become the symbol of Aestheticism, in the 1880s a sunflower was named after him and a craze for planting them swept the UK and the USA.

The sunflower, and the myths and ideas wrapped up in its form, have inspired artists and designers for centuries, reaching a particular peak in late 19th century Britain. In this talk, I will examine the representations of the sunflower in the current Aestheticism exhibition ‘Look Beneath the Lustre’ at Wightwick Manor and discuss how works by the De Morgans’ fit into the wider fashion for sunflowers in art, literature, design and many other fields during the late 19th century.

From William De Morgan’s sunflower tile designs, to Evelyn De Morgan’s Clytie and The Bells of San Vito paintings, to William Morris’ Sunflower wallpaper, Edward Burne Jones’ stained glass windows, Thomas Jekyll’s metalwork designs, G. F. Watts’ sculpture to Christina Rossetti’s nursery rhyme and the colour of the ‘Greenery Yallery’ of the newly opened Grosvenor Gallery, where Evelyn De Morgan and other pioneering artists exhibited their work, sunflowers were the height of fashion and the symbol of a movement.

Hannah Squire is a writer, curator, postgraduate researcher and 19th century art historian, focussing her research on women and Queer artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement.