Fine-art print →
Joséphine symbolism nearly made me draw the wrong rose. I was working on a damask rose from a specimen, and had half-decided to treat it as an Empire flower. Then I checked the dates. The rose most people picture when they picture her garden was not bred until 1843. She had been dead for twenty-nine years.
TL;DRJoséphine bought Malmaison in 1799 and paid for three of the finest botanical books ever printed. The rose that carries the garden’s name was bred in 1843, twenty-nine years after she died.
Key Facts
The garden Joséphine actually built
She acquired the château at Rueil in 1799, while Napoleon was in Egypt. The house was modest by imperial standards. What she did with the land was not. Joséphine employed the best botanists and gardeners she could reach, and built a large hothouse for the tender material. Her orders to the London nursery of Kennedy and Lee continued while France and Britain were at war. The consignments crossed the Channel through a naval blockade, because both governments let them pass.
By 1803 she had commissioned a book about the place. Étienne Pierre Ventenat wrote the descriptions and Pierre-Joseph Redouté supplied the pictures. There were 120 plates, issued in parts between 1803 and 1805 as Jardin de la Malmaison. Many show species newly arrived from Australia and the Cape. That tells you what the garden was really for. It was an acclimatisation project rather than a flower bed. One art historian reads it as imperial politics conducted through plants.
What a patron actually pays for
Redouté was appointed flower painter to the Empress, and the arrangement lasted the rest of her life. The volume of work it produced is still startling. Les Liliacées ran to eight volumes between 1802 and 1816, carrying more than 450 plates. After Ventenat died, the botanist Aimé Bonpland took over the Malmaison descriptions. Redouté supplied a further 152 plates for that project, between 1812 and 1817.
Set against the garden itself, the books are the durable part. Plants die. Estates get sold, and Malmaison was sold and broken up not long after her death. The plates survived, and they are why anyone knows what grew there. A patron who commissions a good illustrator is buying a record, whether she means to or not. That is the pattern behind most of the golden age of botanical illustration.
Joséphine symbolism and a rose that arrived in 1843
She died at Malmaison on 29 May 1814. Les Roses began appearing three years later, in thirty parts issued between March 1817 and March 1824. Claude-Antoine Thory wrote the botanical text. Copies vary: some carry 168 plates, some 169, most with a frontispiece portrait as well. You can turn the whole work over at the Library of Congress.
‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ came later still. Jean Béluze, a breeder in Lyon, introduced the Bourbon rose in 1843. He named it for the garden rather than for the woman, and by then the garden had gone. Joséphine symbolism has run on that flower ever since. It commemorates a place where it never grew.
Where Joséphine symbolism outruns the evidence
The figure you meet everywhere is roughly 250 varieties. It turns up in garden writing, in catalogue essays, and now in AI-generated answers. Chase it and the ground gets soft. Historians have gone looking for the paperwork. Jennifer Potter and the French rose specialist François Joyaux both report the same absence: no surviving list of her roses. Joyaux can name only a handful with confidence. English visitors arriving shortly after her death found roses growing among other flowers, shaded by trees, in a garden already slipping.
None of that means the history of roses owes her nothing. Her buying pushed French breeders hard, and the varieties that followed are real. What the record will not carry is the rose garden of legend, holding every rose then known. Joséphine symbolism filled that gap, and it filled it so well that the correction rarely travels with the story.
Drawing a damask rose after reading about Malmaison
The specimen I worked from had opened unevenly. Three petals were fully reflexed while the rest stayed cupped, and one bud had failed and dried on the stem. That asymmetry is the thing a symbol cannot carry. Redouté’s roses are composed, and the composition is the point of them; I left my failed bud in. Fiurdelin is a botanical illustration studio on Lake Como, Italy. The catalogue holds 53 published plates, and nine were selected by juried exhibitions in 2026.
Reading about Malmaison changed how I caption things. A plate labelled “Empire rose” makes a claim about a period. A plate labelled Rosa damascena makes a claim about a plant. Only one of those claims will still be true in fifty years.
Styling French Empire botanical art at home
Fine-art print →
The damask rose above hangs with hydrangea, peony and tulip. The frames are white, the wall warm tan, the headboard dark wood. That is close to the Empire register without imitating it: warm cream, one deep wood note, flowers instead of gilt. Empire taste is really a colour story, so keep the wall plain and let the palette work. A generous cream mat matters more than the frame you choose. A narrow mat makes a botanical plate read as a poster, which is the opposite of the period. Four plates in an even grid suit a headboard or a sofa. The run of wall is wide there, so the symmetry reads as deliberate rather than sparse. Over a console, drop to two. A 30 by 40 cm frame reads well at conversational distance. Go larger only where the wall runs wider than about 120 cm. The botanical art prints room pages show these same plates at real heights, in real rooms.
FAQ
Did Joséphine really grow every rose then known?
Almost certainly not. The claim is far weaker than its popularity suggests. No list of the roses at Malmaison has survived. The figure of about 250 varieties is repeated far more often than it is sourced. She was a serious and expensive plant collector. The all-known-roses version of that is a later embellishment.
What does Joséphine symbolism mean in botanical art?
It means the meanings later attached to her. The rose became an emblem of the First Empire, the empress a gardener, Malmaison a lost paradise. Joséphine symbolism is genuinely useful as cultural history. It is unreliable as a horticultural record, and the two get mixed up constantly.
Was Redouté’s Les Roses a record of the Malmaison garden?
Not straightforwardly. The work appeared between 1817 and 1824, after Joséphine’s death. Redouté and Thory drew on roses from many gardens and nurseries. Her patronage shaped Redouté’s career and paid for his earlier books. Les Roses is best read as his own project rather than her inventory.
Which rose is named after Malmaison?
‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’, a Bourbon rose introduced by Jean Béluze of Lyon in 1843. It is pale pink, heavily quartered, and strongly scented. Gardeners still grow it, though it sulks in wet weather. The name honours the garden’s reputation, which by 1843 was already the main thing left of it.
Can I visit Malmaison today?
Yes. The château at Rueil-Malmaison, west of Paris, is a French national museum, and its park is open to visitors. A garden of old roses sits nearby. Check the museum’s own site for opening hours before travelling.
The patron is the story
Patronage is the least glamorous part of botanical art history and the part that decides what survives. Joséphine paid for plates, and the plates outlived the empire, the marriage and the garden. The Living Canvas, my book, traces that pattern further: who funded the great collections, and why. It is on Amazon in print and Kindle, with an audiobook edition on Spotify. The damask rose that sent me down this road sits in the Fiurdelin collection with the rest of the plates.
