G F Watts, Ellen Terry (Choosing), 1864, oil on strawboard mounted on Gatorfoam, 47.2 x 35.2cm © National Portrait Gallery

Watts’ Choosing: online talk with Curator, Christina Bradstreet

Join Watts Gallery for this free online talk led by Christina Bradstreet, curator of the exhibition and author of Scented Visions: Smell in Art, 1850-1914 to discover how Watts drew on the Victorian language of flowers and popular perceptions of the visual and the olfactory in the hierarchy of the senses to create this exquisite painting.

In G. F. Watts’s painting ‘Choosing’, the Victorian actress Ellen Terry is shown choosing between the luscious, cultivated camellia pressed to her nose and the humble, sweet-smelling wild violets clutched to her heart. Representing the artist’s private commemoration of the choice Terry had recently made between a flamboyant life on the stage and a comparatively sheltered life of domesticity as Watts’s first wife and muse.