Eleven fishermen disappear beneath the waves, and the Lalla Rookh limps back to Gravesend. Slowly, over the next few days, bodies will wash ashore between Worthing and Shoreham-By-The-Sea, but only eight. Three will never surface (James Newman Jr., John Newman and Harry Newman). The Lalla Rookh will be refitted and then, with November 1850 simply a set of notations in Lloyd’s List, it will head to sea. It will pass Worthing, maybe with a hint of guilt, maybe a little further out than necessary. Britannia and its crew a fading memory. There is storm brewing on the horizon. If you look closely into the waves, you will see flowers, just a few, roses, waterlogged and the colour of blood pushed way in the wake as the ship passes.

There is a scene in Moore’s Lalla Rookh of roses cast on the ground. It is after the wedding of Lalla Rookh and Feramorz and the ground has been covered with rose petals for the royal procession. In 1887, the American artist Henry Siddon Mowbray (1858-1928) produced one of his best known paintings “Rose Harvest” based on this scene. Mowbray shows a group of people preparing the path for the princess by spreading the petals on the ground. Like its inspiration, Mowbray’s painting is a reflection of a continuing fascination in the West with the “exotic” East often tinged with the erotic.

But it was a different gesture of casting roses that Lalla Rookh made me think of, a gesture captured in the work of the modern American painter Marsden Hartley. In Roses for Seagulls that Lost their Way, 1935 and, more specifically, Roses, 1941. In both paintings, Hartley depicts wreaths of roses, the later based on an event witnessed in Blue Rocks, Nova Scotia at the funeral of Alty and Donny Mason, friends of the artist who drowned. Hartley captures a maritime tradition of casting roses on the water at a fisherman’s memorial. Hartley would produce a number of powerful works based on the Mason family tragedy including Fishermen’s Last Supper, 1940-41.

Henry Siddon Mowbray’s Rose Harvest
Paintings by Marsden Hartley {1} {2} {3}