The bronze bust of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is a copy of that created by the French Enlightenment sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon in 1780, two years after Rousseau died at his woodland retreat in Ermenonville. Houdon intentionally chose for the form of his portrait an antique-style herm. Rousseau is cloaked in a toga, identifying him with the great Classical philosophers, and his head is wrapped in a band that Houdon denoted “the ribbon of immortality.” “SOUR VASE” is an anagram, in Roman letters (a “v” replaces one “u”), of “ROUSSEAU.” The “vase,” or the thinking of Rousseau, is elegant, learned, vibrant, unconventional and committed, but it carries a corrosive (“sour”) and politically incendiary content. Rousseau famously wrote, “Men are wicked, but man is good.”

The wildflower, emblematic of innocence, purity, liberty and the absence of artifice, is deliberately associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Genevan philosopher, contrary to other Enlightenment thinkers, radically posited that man’s best, happiest and most fulfilling condition is a “State of Nature” removed from the perverting order and mechanisms of society. Rousseau’s writings were to become the touchstone for Romanticism – and for a perception of Nature (vs. culture, or society) as the paramount teacher and moral guide. The title of this exhibition is a variation upon a quote of Rousseau’s: “The forest [nature] became my study.” The wildflower, because it signals a fiercely embraced philosophical stance, is thus “Ideological, Like a Badge.” Fittingly here, the votive wildflower sits not in a vase but in a humble, rustic preserve jar.