Recording of live event, 06-Dec-2022, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm CDT: “Botanical Art: From classic to contemporary” – A Lunchtime Lecture by Dr. Denis Benjamin
In this presentation, FWBG|BRIT Resident Research Associate Dr. Denis Benjamin discusses topics on botanical art.
Lunchtime Lectures are part of the Research Lecture Series at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden and Botanical Research Institute of Texas. For more information, please visit http://fwbg.org/lecture-series. Watch other videos from this series and additional research-related content at our playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Fishing I can’t believe the educational purpose oh education Department’s always ready for everything we’re like you know we’re like the Girl Scouts well welcome to uh welcome to grid into our lunchtime lecture series is there a microphone yeah those who don’t hear as well oh here all right the one that’s in
Your pocket okay so I’m here to introduce our amazing guest speaker today so uh like I’m excuse to present our sorry he said let’s play doctor yes Benjamin and he is a research associate here at uh you’ve been a research associate here seven years so one of the one of the ways that
Finish line is we have a meaningful interest in our colleagues and so one of the things I want to encourage you to do today is when the lecture is over please go and view some of his artwork that he has done over here on the table it’s beautiful so
Um be sure and do that and then Anna was so nice to bring his books from the library that underlooked to those too so when we’re done here today feel free to do that on your way out so um Dennis is I need to be the research associate but tagging along
With his amazing amount of artwork is he’s also a signature member of the Fort Worth Society of watercolor art episode without any further Ado I’m going to turn it over to you Dennis and thank you so much for your time today and come in and speaking [Applause]
Wow what a pleasure to have people to actually speak to be their reaction I hate giving pure Zoom talks so for those of you who it’s really helpful if I make a joke please Giggle and if you stay awake to the end we have some little gifts for you on your on
Your way out um so one of the things that you learn about public speaking is you should never start with an apology but I am going to the first thing I’m going to apologize is my pronunciation of people’s names um I speak I I don’t speak French or Spanish or German or Dutch
I’m pretty good at English unless it’s Texan but there is one person in this room who I know will help me in fact he knows more about the subject than I ever will um wherever you go around this country if you say that you associated with Brit the first thing
That you will hear was is oh you must know Barney Lipscomb My body is the face of Brit everywhere and he knows and his flesh on one of the artists I’m going to talk to talk about is absolutely brilliant I hope he should give it once a year just so that you could hear about this one artist that that we will cover
The second apology is if I sound a little strident and a little too passionate because I am um mainly because Botanical art has really dominated my life for the last 10 years and the second is I am really hoping that the Fort Worth Botanic Garden
And Brew it will one day have a robust botanic art program with a certificate in botanic art just like the Great botanic gardens around the world like Q rural Gardens and Edinburgh New York Missouri Denver and others uh where their Botanical art program actually produces is one of their major Revenue producers um
And we’ll perhaps get a few minutes to discuss that at the end so those are my my two major apologies [Applause] what I’m not going to be discussing today are the developments in especially in printing from woodblock to Copper plates etching Engravings to life lithography and and to the
Modern digital era so I’m going to ignore all that because I know absolutely nothing about that area of of publication if you want to know any of that please ask Marley I’ve also been very selective about the artists that I’ve chosen to highlight uh some of that is personal I’m ignoring a
Huge number of people who made major contributions uh to art and each one is just going to be a thumbnail I mean I could literally spend an hour on week each one of these amazing people that have contributed to Botanical art over over the centuries
Now one thing that you may gather as you go through this is that there are four themes see if you can detect them the first one I’ll Call Serendipity and connections almost none of the people I’m going to discuss started life or started their working career saying I wanted to be a
Botanical artist they started out in all sorts of different ways but through the connections that they had during their lives they became Botanical artists and it reminds me of a great quote that life is planned Serendipity and the planning doesn’t matter it’s all by accident the second theme is that the number of
Men involved are physically are Physicians like me now this made sense in the old days because until 1945 or thereabouts almost all our medications came from plants so botany was a major component of medical school in fact I’m not that old but but the medical school that I went to
Required one full year of Botany as a prerequisite um so it’s it’s not a surprise that Physicians got involved in botany because they had to understand where these plans were coming from this the next theme of women women played a major role in this and I won’t speculate
As a male I wouldn’t speculate on anything that a woman does um but the interesting thing is the challenges that they faced living in a man’s world during those centuries and the fourth theme is how many of these artists went bankrupt trying to sell trying to get their art
Either published or sold and so the message is if you want to make a living and doing Botanical art good luck it’s not something that I would advise any of my kids to go into okay they started so and I’ve changed my title to Western Botanical art because we’re really focusing on really
European Botanical art there are other cultures Chinese Japanese Indian that developed a Botanical art way back that I wish I knew more about but have not been well represented in the west so we’re just going to concentrate on Western the technical art from antiquity to Contemporary Art and the first
Question is what on Earth is Botanical art I’m going to divide it into three main groups this Botanical illustration which is used for science there’s what I’m going to be spending most of the time on Botanical art from classical contemporary and then and I don’t mean to disparage this flower painting
And there are all sorts of genres involved in flower painting from realism to impressionism to abstract art and put simply the differences between these really related emphasis so Botanical illustration the emphasis is on the scientific record and accuracy to enable the identification of a plant in fact it’s instructional
Botanical art on the other hand should be reasonably scientifically accurate you should be able to recognize what the plan is um but it should be aesthetically pleasing and then flower painting is often part of a landscape or a still life uh or a variety of other settings in which flowers are are depicted
So scientific illustration is usually from live plants but as Tiana knows people will sneak into the herb area and use her barium specimens to illustrate uh for scientific purposes and it’s usually to illustrate a text either a book or an article and all features of the plant are usually shown roots
Leaves flowers the naughty bits the pollinators all stages of a life cycle and it must enable an accurate identification they’re almost always in the painting there’ll be a ruler so that you know exactly what the size of everything is and over 90 of these are monochrome it’s
Usually either graphite pen and ink but very seldom is color used this is a classic example of a Botanical illustration and here’s another one that actually uses color this is by uh yoga erid of Magnolia Grande Flora everybody will recognize the Magnolia but if you look at the bottom you see everything
From the seeds to the seed pods to every stage of its life cycle okay sorry here’s another example of a classic scientific illustration on the left this is in a medical uh colors medical plants compared to Botanical art which represents the dandelion in a completely different
Way but here you see all stages of the development of the flower and the plant are Illustrated perfectly so Botanical art on the other hand while scientifically correct may not be complete the emphasis is on its aesthetic value it follows the trends of the time and the current trend is doing
Watercolor on calf skin Vellum this is actually a return to a really old way of painting Botanical subjects um I wish I could learn how to paint on Vellum he said Vellum these days is really expensive and you have to knock out I’ll perhaps get to that in a few minutes
It’s almost always on a plain background almost always White and it’s the use is the median that’s most often used is trying transparent watercolor or gouache for those of you who don’t know what gouache is it’s opaque watercolor it’s uh been used for years and years by everybody from Sergeant to Turner to
Many many other artists but was it was also a favorite medium for many botanic artists here’s an example of a classic illustration of pathetic art and we’ll be talking more about this artist in a few minutes um another two one by Pandora sellers that we are talking will be discussing
In a beautiful rose by redote and it’s this genre that really I’m going to be focusing on and that’s what I would call Botanical art a pincushion flower a amazing painting by a Seattle artist that again we’ll be talking about believe it or not this is a heirloom tomato
Which probably tastes like it looks and then the third group said I won’t be talking about it is flower painting and that the emphasis is on Aesthetics there’s no scientific accuracy uh it’s often in a vase or a part of a still life or even part of a landscape and
It’s probably the most common style today of depicting flowers and the media may be watercolor maybe gouache maybe acrylics maybe oils and here are two what I would regard as incredible flower paintings and both of them are by Fort Worth artists uh soon Warren painted this one and both of these were
Displayed in the botanic art shows that we held at Brit in 2019 and Lauren McCracken both of these are internationally well-known artists uh Laura it’s unusual for Lauren to plain flowers I convinced him for our show that he needed to to paint one and this was his rendition of a magnolia
So these are flower paintings in a very classical Style and then we move to impressionism and all of you will recognize Matisse Van Gogh these amazing irises obviously the sunflowers are well known mornets water lilies and many followed by the paintings of Giorgio O’Keefe and I’m not going to get into
The sexuality involved in her paintings because that’s another whole discussion I could take off a day to the Modern Art of Pete mondrion and this is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and then I just off the internet plucked a whole bunch of what I would call
Abstract paintings of flowers and it’s clear that flowers have influenced artists over the years to develop this abstract style some of these I think are really interesting there are thousands of them to choose from foreign it’s the only time I’m going to extend beyond European art because I love Australian Aboriginal art
And this is uh by an Aboriginal artist and it represents Bush bananas which is a major important fruit uh in the bush for their nutrition and then on the side you see the footprints which is symbolic of their water walkabouts that they do in order to connect with the Earth foreign
Between when you do a program and key keynote and then translate it over to PowerPoint but so if you look at scientific accuracy against perceive athletic aesthetic value you can see scientific illustration very high scientific accuracy but nobody cares about it other than the scientists who engage artists to produce the
Artwork for their Publications then you have Botanical art flower painting flower painting impressionism and flower painting asp abstract and you can see that the way it’s appreciated in modern society is really different and the technical odd is just not valued and there’s one person who happens to be
In this audience who had a absolutely magnificent painting in a recent show that the jurors completely ignored and that this is very typical of you try and put a painting of a of a flower just by itself in a jury so the chances are overwhelming that you either will
Not be accepted or you won’t be recognized um and I don’t understand what the bias against facade is but it’s real uh and that’s compounded also by watercolor for some reason watercolor art is not valued like acrylics or Oils and that again is a topic for a button
To our discussion okay so let’s talk about botanic art over the the various uh time scales and we’re going to start when from utility to science to Aesthetics so we’re going to mention a little bit about Antiquity before 5000 BC the early portrayal of plants the herbals the Renaissance and the emergence of
Naturalism and modern botany and then the Golden Age of Botanical art was really the age of colonialism an exploration and Discovery and these when all the species Seekers were out finding plants in exotic countries that had never been seen in Europe and were brought back and Illustrated and then finally will in end
With some contemporary Botanical art now it’s really interesting at least to me at least that representation of plants was extremely uncommon in a lot of our prehistory you will not find for example in rock paintings or petroglyphs or plants are just not representative even in for example First
Nation arts in are in North America you will not find any plans uh represented it’s all animals it’s fish it’s Birds um oats various spiritual and unusual animals but here’s one that that is probably the earliest known and this is the Botanical chamber the Temple of conak which was built by
Tutnosis III in 1465 BC and the entire chamber is Illustrated with plants that Egyptians had brought back from various countries at least 275 species are Illustrated that came from Syria they’ve also Illustrated lots of Egyptian plants but to me this is the most beautiful and this predated any anything in Egyptian
In Egypt by about 300 years this is a fresco in a house on the island of Santorini in Greece and it shows two swallows and these beautiful red lilies these red lilies is probably the red Lilies of Greece that were first described by Linnaeus growing on the on the mountain of
Chalcedon in facility and it’s probably the first painting that we have where you can actually identify what what the uh what the flower is but beyond that there is not a lot in Antiquity uh where flowers were were depicted the next major development were herbals so herbals were designed to record the medicinal
Uses of plants and as I mentioned since most of our medication came from Plants was really important that Physicians knew you know what they looked like how to use them um and the earliest herbals illustrating them were written as early as 15 A.D from the two most important ones was the
Historia plantarum by thefraid but way more important was just Corey IDs and this was demateria Medica and this remained a standard medical text until the 17th century which is truly remarkable it’s been translated and Illustrated in a hundred literally in a dozen or more different languages here are some of the
This one is the history of of plants by theophrastus and here’s one by just couriitis uh in that was produced in about the 16th century but here’s an example where it was translated into Arabic in Spain in the 12th and 13th 13th century so this was the standard textbook of drugs that were
Available at that time and they were really important in the early development of Botanical art the first one that was really published in English was the great herbal in 1526 and these obviously are wood cuts a wood block illustrations that were done at the time
I’m not going to spend any more time on herbals as interesting as they are it’s really fun to read so we’re going to move quite a few centuries later almost well to the to the Renaissance and artists like Leonardo da Vinci um illustrate was already illustrating
Plans here we see the Star of Bethlehem and two different plants he has uh an oak and Dyer’s Greenwood or janista tinctoria so you could make a pigment a yellow dye out of this particular plant and then if you mixed it with word which was from another plant which was
Blue you got green and that’s how many of those early pigments that the artists use were extracted from uh from these plants a little later although not much Albrecht Dura a German Renaissance artist um Illustrated natural history in some of the most spectacular paintings many of you may the one you probably will
Recognize most which I’m not illustrating is is rabbit he has a rabbit I don’t think anyone has ever painted a bit of depiction of a rabbit but his tuft of grass which is ill oh sorry which is Illustrated here remains a classic of Botanical illustration it truly is spectacular
But we’re going to leave that area and really now move to what became a whole new era of our Botanical art and Maria Cibola Marion and we have one of her books out in the counter that I really encourage people at the end of this talk to go over and just page
Through uh some of those those books she was uh her parents were Swiss but she was born in Frankfurt and that turns out to be really important because Frankfurt was the center of the silkworm trade in Europe at the time and so she grew caterpillars to make silk
And she got really interested in how these and noticed that these caterpillars if you let them go long enough turned into moths and that got her interested in uh in in Metamorphosis so by the age of by the age of 13 she was already collecting and illustrating many of many of these insects
The first collection of her Engravings which were which was known as the new uh book of flowers the first edition sold at Christie’s in 2011 for 500 000 pounds now unfortunately Marianne had a really unhappy marriage and she moved from uh Frankfurt to uh to Holland
And to a sort of you today you’d call it a commune that practiced celibacy at the the Walther Castle she moved there with her daughter with with her two daughters the interesting part of that was the owner of the castle was also the Governor of sewerland which was a Dutch Colony it’s nagyana
And after a number of years she moved back to uh to Amsterdam and was encouraged to go to Suriname where she published her metamorphosis of in of the insects of Suriname and that book is over there it is so heavy I cannot even lift it
Um but it has some of the um most astounding illustrations uh especially of of the caterpillars now this was one of the many women who who suffered because of her sex and because of the Gill system and being a woman she was permitted only to paint with watercolor in gouache
Was not allowed to paint in oils that was reserved for men here are a couple of or three of her illustrations so please when you get a chance uh go over there the unfortunate final episode of Miriam is that in uh 17. 15 she had a stroke she was paralyzed
She wasn’t able to to paint and she died like many artists as a pauper following her was Georg dionysius Eric I love dionysius because that’s where my name is derived from it means if you remember your Greek mythology a god of wine okay he was a German Partners an entomologist uh
And he collaborated with with Linnaeus and George Clifford who was a banker and governor of the Dutch East India Company and produced a amazing volume the hardest uh Clifford tianis he moved to London when he was fairly young and then the young Joseph Banks who was at Kew Gardens and you’re going
To hear a word Banks again and again throughout this because of the incredible influence he had on botanic art um had just returned from Newfoundland and Labrador and Eric painted many of these specimens on vellum he spent his entire life at Kew Gardens he was given I’m trying to remember
How much he was given uh in celery I don’t don’t have it in my notes but here because of his very close associated with Linnaeus he Illustrated many of the important Publications on a classification that Linnaeus had developed in botany at the time they had this very close collaboration
Naira died at the age of 62 in Chelsea and I just want to say a few words about Chelsea because we’re going there next year to see the Chelsea flower show so Chelsea at this time was a little village outside London on the Thames but it had incredible alluvial soils
So that all the explorers that were coming back from uh Australia and New Zealand places in the Pacific like who bring plants back they were planted at Chelsea before they were distributed to a queue and gardens around the world so Chelsea became a really important place for
Plants when they were coming back from many of the Explorers during this period and in fact there was the the physic Garden at Chelsea hunt Sloan got the government to declare that Garden as a place where medicinal plants would be grown in perpetuity I’m hoping still to see that
Now Madeleine Francois bus report as you might tell was French and again here was a person who started off not intending to be a Botanical art painter she was a Portrait Painter and this is actually one of the portraits this is not her um but became the Royal painter to the
King’s Garden and cabinet uh in in France this was unprecedented for a woman to hold this particular position she interestingly enough she held that position for 40 years and during that time she was the art instructor for the King’s children and she also did some interior design and
She also taught Louis the 15th mistress the Marquis De pompadour uh how to how to paint thank you I need to keep track of the time oh there’s a clock so this is one of the tragic stories of people going bankrupt and this was Robert John Thornton he was
An English physician a Botanical writer and he produced a three volume series on because of again he’s associated with Linnaeus on the sexual system uh of plants the three volumes did not sell uh and they he they tried uh he tried everything to sell them including a lottery which failed
Um and so he landed up in financial ruin and only 800 copies of his 31 plane plates were ever published he had originally planned to do 70 and he also had a political motivation at the time which he admitted and that was to show that English Botanical art was better than
French Botanical art anyway the third volume is known as the Temple of Flora uh and if you go over to the table afterwards we have a copy of the third volume the Temple of of Flora and many of these images he um commissioned other artists to produce uh
Before he was able to to print them and many of them have probably recognized this trilicia is widely uh uh distributed in metallic a lot these days here’s the lodge flowering sensitive plant this is hand colored the original now is in the National Gallery of Victoria and
You can see the size of this plant if you look at this person over here compared to and I’m trying to remember the name of this it’s uh Barney help me do you remember there caliendra grandoflora Caliendo Gran of Flora is the name of their plant so he lost every almost everything uh
Hoping to be able to produce uh that particular publication very interesting was Mario North Samaria North had in her early life trained as a vocalist but a voice was terrible and said failed and she began painting flowers and she was probably I think I I think I’m pretty widely traveled Maria North
Went to more countries more often than I could even imagine she was one of the most widely traveled people um she painted in uh very bright colors she always included backgrounds so it would not be considered a classical Botanical artist today and her association with Charles Darwin at the
Time encouraged her to go to Australia as one of her particular travels she has the only permanent collection by a female artist in Britain and has a number of species that named that are named after her she always wore Victorian clothes uh regardless of where she was she
Painted only in oils she had no formal training and when she died 848 paintings were given to Kew Gardens and here are some of her paintings this for example this pitcher plant nepenthes North Vienna was one of the the species that was named after her but she
Had at least a dozen half a dozen species that had never been described before she went to South Africa and this particular we used to call these red hot pokers in South Africa I still cannot for the life of me pronounce the genus name as hard as I try this one is also
Named after her and here’s one of the banksia species that she Illustrated in Australia she was truly exceptional and this is the gallery uh that she has at Kew Gardens in 2016 the BBC did a wonderful program on her if you want to try and find it entitled The cues forgotten Queen
About what she had contributed okay this one’s a kind of tragic story uh this is Sydney Parkinson you’re Scottish um and originally was supposed to be a wool Draper in the world trade but got converted to be doing Botanical and natural history illustrations and found himself in queue at Kew Gardens
If you get the impression that Q is the center of the Botanical world it is it is just there’s there’s nothing that can compete I don’t think with q uh while you’re so cute Joseph Banks recognized his skill and asked him to accompany cook on the first voyages to
The Pacific where he made over a thousand illustrations despite the flat fact that in Tahiti swarms of flies 80s paints uh but and you know when I look back at these artists and realize the conditions under which they painted and the materials that they had available
And the skill that they had it’s just truly remarkable unfortunately at the age of 26 he died of dysentery on his way home and his work pretty much lay hidden for over a hundred years before finally it was published in 1988 and we have a copy
Of the banks for religion and the word for those who don’t know floral Legion is a book or a selection of paintings from a specific region or Expedition so for example the floral Legion of banks really was from those expeditions to the Pacific at that time uh
Uh it was published in 35 volumes it was just lurking in the archives at Q until 1988 100 years and his images were then used uh to to create what you’ll see over there it’s now been digitized and that’s what’s really fun about any of us is you
Can go online and find all these collections now digitized and available for you to to view foreign artist that only lived until he was 26 whoops oh yeah here he is with many of the clients that he Illustrated from Australia he’s obviously eucalyptus flowers uh different species of banksia but he also
Illustrated some of the local uh indigenous people that he saw in New Zealand Tahiti uh um now here’s an individual that most people wouldn’t consider a Botanical artist in fact our library doesn’t have a single book by Beatrix Potter I went through it in the last week I
Couldn’t find a single copy so Beatrix is interesting uh she had been raised by three governesses in uh the middle of England and was very interested in Natural History and by the age of eight she produced one of her first booklets illustrating their net knowledge in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London
The reason I’m attracted to Beatrix or they’re actually two one is here are some of her Natural History images is because of this she was she got converted to mycology and painted some of the most amazing uh illustrations of mushrooms these were on display at the Seattle Art Museum a
Number of years ago and they truly are exceptional at that time she wrote a paper on the germination of spores from fungi and submitted the the paper to the linnaean society but because she was a woman she was not allowed to make the presentation and then she also withdrewed a few
Months later uh because of uh she realized a couple of the specimens had been contaminated it wasn’t until 1997 at the lanaian society issued an apology for how they had treated her so she gave up mycology and she wrote a book and then she wrote a book as The Tale of Peter Rabbit
And she self-published it because she couldn’t find a publisher to to publish it for it she so she self-published 250 copies there are now 250 million copies of her books around the world so if you’re thinking of writing a book and you can’t find a publisher self-publish
Had her mushroom paintings I think are truly exceptional so this is probably the most important and most prolific Botanical artist and um it’s not read out as I used to call it it’s herote the French Pierre Joseph Realty was there a fail of roses and here is and I’m hoping Barney
Will give his talk on this artist I issued once a year because it is exceptional he was born in Belgium left home at 13. do a lot of interior design joined his brother in Paris painting scenery for theater but then he met botanist who guided his heart towards flower padding and that’s
When he got introduced to the royalty at Versailles and from then on his life was all roses so to speak uh he painted for the court of Marie Antoinette until she lost her head and then for Empress Josephine at melmeso uh unbelievably prolific and absolutely gorgeous painter over uh 2100 pledge
1800 species nearly 50 books and in 1985 somebody ripped up one of his books uh and 468 leaves were bought by a New York auction an art dealer for five and a half million and then have just been dispersed many of you will recognize these and
We’ve got a couple of these books uh books over here now almost contemporary with him were the bower Brothers they were Austrian Brothers uh considered preeminent in in painters of Natural History a Ferdinand uh was sort of the Explorer he went to Greece and came back
And wrote a flora of Greece and then again at the urging of of banks accompanied Flinders during his circumnavigation of Australia and painted and brought back many of the specimens every his brother Franz was probably the better Botanical artist so when was the painter one was the Explorer
And again we’ve got a copy of of their book on on the table they were initially engaged to paint miniature watercolor illustrations of about 3 000 plants uh that included the floor of lower or straight Australia and that was published in a 14 volume the book of of the planned Kingdom
The sad note about uh oh one thing I I need I need to mention about ready to take is uh he died while painting a white lily which sort of seems appropriate um I’m gonna talk again about it one or two more deaths um uh franzbauer because of his Botanical skills that a
Lot of microscopic dissection and also was one of the first to use microscopes to illustrate many of the microscopic features and probably was the first botanic artist to use a camera elucider his brother Ferdinand developed the most amazing color coding scheme so when he came back from all his
Explorations people would know exactly what color he had seen on a plant just a few words about William hooker and the main reason I’m putting it in this is because any artist in the in the room will have all seen that there’s one green that you can
Buy from Windsor Newton or any of the art companies called hookers green and he was the one who really developed it he was the official Odyssey at Royal agriculture Society it was really best known for his paintings of fruit William Curtis who was another important character English Partners the entomologist was
The curator of the Chelsea physic Garden and he published the Flora London Essence in seven volumes it didn’t sell he was close to bankruptcy and so he began a magazine called the Botanical magazine which we still get cockpits of it’s the longest running magazine Botanical magazine and it was still hand colored until
1948 which is pretty amazing and he employed a lot of artists to work on this I’m going to change from classic art to two unusual uh genres and this is Mary Delaney so Mary Delaney she was born in was uh lived in the 1700s born into a very upper class family she
Was hoping to be a lady in waiting which we now would what the new term is a queen’s companion uh except that the queen she was hoping to be ladies and waiting for Queen Anne died so she lost their chance but she had a very close association with people like Handel
Was a main supporter and promoter of of his music lived in the Upper Crust of English life and like most people at that at that stage the woman knew embroidery and a whole variety of other Arts well when she was 72 she noticed that when she clipped
Some paper it looked like a geranium petal and she started putting paper uh paper cuts together to create a mixed media collage which is absolutely astounding um we read this book as part of Britain book club a few years ago by Molly uh peacock about her called the paper
Garden but her collection of paper cut flowers yeah you see a Spider Lily passion flower are truly stunning and those are now at the uh at the Kew Gardens equally stunning and using a completely different Media or the Blasco basket Brothers Leopold and Rudolph and for
Those of you who ever in Boston you have to go to the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see this collection it’s glass flowers 847 of them uh and let’s just go on and on it’s almost unbelievable I’ve never seen glass constructed like this Margaret me was a very interesting character and now we’re into the 19th century and at the age of 42 she left England and moved to the Amazon uh she taught a little bit of Art and saw Polo but then started exploring the the Amazon and painting the plants that
She saw there she was one of the first environmentalists to draw attention to the impact of large-scale Mining and destruction of the Amazon she she and her first husband were very socially conscious conscious individuals that were trade unionists they were very active in politics helping underserved underserved people uh and she Illustrated
Uh in fact almost all the important plants in the Amazon the one thing that she really wanted to paint was an epiphytic cactus called a moon commonly known as the Moon Flower that only flowers one night a year she had seen the plant but she had never
Seen the flower and she spent years looking for and finding her Moonflower that was her final painting um she tracked down one had flashlights with her painted it when the moon came out uh her Nev the pollinator had never been seen it’s probably a Sphinx Moth that pollinated
And following this painting she returned to London to for a major exhibition of her art unfortunately during that trip she was killed in a car crash and the at the age of 70 something amazing Legacy at Margaret me Left Behind 400 folios during the real Carnival in 1994 uh
Three thousand dollars was paraded to a Margaret me uh theme at the carnival at the Rio Carnival a few more I have to mention before we get to close to the end Lillian Snelling was really important to the Curtis Botanical magazine and worked there almost for 30 years
She received a member of the British Empire which is the sort of female equivalent of being knighted as well as the Victoria medal which is like the Medal of Honor that that we give out and did most of the many of the illustrations in the in the Curtis magazine
It’s an interesting character that some of you may know because she’s the only Botanical illustrator at the Smithsonian have ever has ever employed and that’s at Alice tangerini um she received a ba in Fine Art but really taught herself in Botanical illustration and draws mainly with a pencil many herbarium specimens
Very seldom uses color unfortunately she lost a sight in an accident following an injury but is still continuing Pandora sellers I think is one of the most important and influential botanists in the recent century and she began she came from an artistic family but she started painting orcas because she found that
Cameras could not capture the color of what she was seeing and this is sort of an interesting point is that people thought that Botanical art was going to die when we developed photography not true cameras cannot capture what an artist can and especially certain colors probably the most important being red um
And so she became but her exceptional Talent was composition and more important or leaves the most difficult aspect of Botanical art or leaves for any of us that have painted and if you look at Botanical art you can tell who is good or bad based on the quality of the leaves that they
Represent Pandora was a master at doing this uh she’s also left a legacy of dozens of people that she’s influenced and here you see two of her Orchid paintings and you can see the quality of illustration uh of her leaves they um first book of slipper orchids she did
Most of the illustrations for and in 1993 her orchids were released as a set of stamps in the United Kingdom uh during the 14th World Orchid conference now many of you hopefully will recognize Shirley Sherwood and Shirley is not an artist but she’s more for me more
Important than an artist she’s a patron Shirley’s husband was who unfortunately passed away during the covert epidemic but not from covert but um was the head of the Oriental Express Empire all the hotels trains Etc and she rejuvenated Botanical petting by coming its Patron she has the largest collection of Botanical uh art
Uh and she established the Sherwood Gallery at Kew Gardens which is the first public Gallery devoted to Classic and contemporary art and here she is receiving her we gave her a conservation award in 2019 at the same time that we had the display of the Botanical Flora America’s Flora in our
Art gallery here and here she is with Greg bird the chairman of the board and uh you stay in bass we were hoping that this would catalyze for it into a new era of Botanical art didn’t quite work out that way but at least we gave it a good college try
Now if you’re going to go to England in the next few months these are two upcoming shows at her Gallery the art of food and when flowers dream two last added artists I just want to mention because they’re really personal to me Gene Emmons uh started life as an
Abstract artist she lives on Fashion Island just outside of Seattle and it was converted to doing incredible Botanical art with watercolor on vellum this painting on the left won the gold medal at the Chelsea flower show a number of years ago uh here’s one of her chestnuts I took a class a
Classroom from Jean and she’s a great teacher but at the end of four hours I had completed a square about an inch big and I said Gene I love your style but I’m going to be dead before I before I ever finish a painting and sure she
Doesn’t do a lot of paintings but each one is amazing she used to put on maybe 10 12 layers of paint she’s now up to 40 or 50. and as you can see they are some of the most remarkable images you can imagine and her latest is this one it’s the celery root
Uh I can’t even begin to imagine how one would paint something like this and the final artist that I I want to mention again because of a personal connection is is Carol wooden I think Carol has really taken on the mantle of Pandora sellers uh Carol she started out life
Driving commercial trucks which doesn’t seem closely related to Botanical art but she’s an incredible Orchid painter these are and I was very fortunate to go with her to Greece to paint the orchids around peleon and she grows the these corn plants in her place in Upstate New York
Uh and then illustrates them each year she has that same incredible technique that Pandora has of illustrating especially leaves so here’s one of the orchids that we found in Greece this one is called These are called bee orchids because they pretend to be insects and so bees come or bees wasps are the
Creatures come and try and mate with them uh this is offer us uh speculum and she posted this one recently saying oh this is a work in progress I think it’s completed I mean her her leaves here are incredible here’s one of her images again of a slipper orchid
And then I have to end with the person who introduced me to Botanical art and that was such a vietnamesky an artist from Saint Petersburg who unquestionably is the best mushroom artist uh uh living today and here’s Sasha this was posted recently looks like this little Forest gnome but what
You’ll notice is he’s surrounded by women and that’s today the history of the technical art I went to a conference at the the American Society of Botanical art there were about 500 people there they were about half a dozen men it’s become a Artful almost entirely practice these days by women
Just a final few notes Botanical art of Brit we try to begin we did begin a program in 2017. we enlisted over 120 local artists we had some great shows here all the painting classes were sold out we brought the world the worldwide botanic Art Exhibit Shirley Sherwood came and we
Even began negotiations with TCU to develop an academic art program and we wrote a grant for a floral Legion of rare Texas Texas plans unfortunately that all died it was disbanded in 2010-21 perhaps covert had something to do with it but there were competing priorities at Brit there were changes in personnel
And a lack of support and the tragedy is that during that time the library received two major donations that are important for botanic art so one was is the K Stansbury collection over a hundred books of Botanical Arts some of which are shown there that need to be more widely
Uh shared and the arrayed in Natural History collection of art which was a donation of over 2 000 classical prints and paintings by very well-known uh artists including redote uh and William roxburgh these now are in the library they need a place to be displayed so finally just want to thank Sasha for
Introducing me to watercolor and mushroom painting initially that’s a long story uh Kathy mcgeegan at the engagement Academy of Art in Seattle soon Warren for helping me to continue here Britt for providing a forum and Carol wooden at the uh American Society for the technical artists and full of crib at Kew Gardens
For their encouragement so I’d like any questions I’m glad to to answer I really would encourage folks to have a look at some of the books now for those of you who still have your eyes open when you leave there are two of my prints that you’re welcome to take one
Is the okatea in bloom and that was the print that we produced for the conservation award for the Shirley Sherwood dinner the other one is a personal one from South Africa it’s Cape Town in the background and the two important South African plants a protea and an orchid
That only grows on Table Mountain Adisa so you’re welcome to take one of one of the others and as you’re going out no I don’t know if this is going to work can we show one of those I Brooke I don’t know how to do it
Um these are from a couple of the botanic art shows that we had uh in the next door Art Gallery uh when we had the program so thanks so much for your attention I haven’t foreign taking your time and supporting us um so how do we how just how do we bring up
One of these YouTubes