This week’s historical rabbit hole
The Woman Who Let Ghosts Do the Painting
A weekly dose of macabre history, gently pressed into your hands like a haunted educational pamphlet.
Meet Georgiana Houghton.
In the 1860s, Houghton was an artist, Spiritualist, and medium who began creating extraordinarily intricate watercolor paintings.
Except according to Georgiana, she wasn’t exactly the one creating them.
The spirits were.
She believed the dead guided her hand as she worked, producing elaborate webs of color, loops, lines, and shapes unlike almost anything being painted at the time.
And she was remarkably specific about her collaborators.
Houghton claimed guidance from deceased family members, higher spiritual beings, and even dead Renaissance artists including Titian and Correggio. (You can just pretend like you know these names.)
Because apparently dying does not get you out of collaborative projects.
She called the works Spirit Drawings.
And here’s where things get really interesting.
They look startlingly like abstract art.
Except Houghton was creating them in the 1860s, roughly half a century before abstraction became associated with artists like Kandinsky.
In 1871, apparently deciding London was ready for this, Houghton rented a prestigious gallery on Bond Street and displayed 155 Spirit Drawings.
London was not ready.
One newspaper described the paintings as resembling tangled colored wool and called them an example of “artistic aberration.”
The exhibition was a commercial disaster and nearly bankrupted her.
Which is especially brutal considering your co-workers are ghosts and therefore contribute absolutely nothing toward rent.
Today, fewer than 50 of Houghton’s works are known to survive, and historians have taken another look at the Victorian medium whose strange paintings appeared decades ahead of the art movement they resemble.
Whether you believe Georgiana was receiving instructions from the spirit world or simply accessing something extraordinarily creative within herself is entirely up to you.
Either way, while the rest of Victorian society was painting portraits and landscapes, Georgiana Houghton was covering paper in psychedelic abstraction and telling everyone:
The dead made me do it. Honestly, we respect the commitment.
This week’s haunting: Parlor Ghost
A fragrance inspired by the Victorian parlor, where the lights were lowered, hands joined around the table, and everyone waited to see who might answer from the other side.
Georgiana brought the spirits a paintbrush.
We prefer perfume.
Please note: none of this was written by robots aka AI. It came from the dark folds of Lacey’s very human mind.
www.seanceperfumes.com · @seanceperfumes
