Blossom and Decay

Frederick Church found inspiration in the Gothic works of Edgar Allan Poe and the romantic exoticism of French painter Odilon Redon. Recent scholarship points to Church’s interest in reincarnation to explain his use of the dismembered head and rose as a repeated motif in his fictional writing, etchings, and paintings, as in the Spencer’s Blossom and Decay. Perhaps, it was a matter of proximity. Church was the proud possessor of one of these rarities at a time when even American museums had yet to display Egyptian mummies.