Marianne North

Marianne North - English Victorian biologist and botanical artist, notable for her plant and landscape paintings.

Kew Gardens

Marianne North had no formal training in illustration but possessed a natural talent and was very prolific.  Painting with a palette of bold colours, she sketched rapidly in pen and ink on heavy paper then used oils straight from the tube.

Unlike the tradition in Victorian flower painting, she liked to paint plants in their natural settings.

  

The walls of the gallery are filled with almost all of Marianne North's botanical paintings. 

Marianne's room at Kew

After an exhibition in a London gallery in 1879, she had the idea of showing her paintings at Kew. She wrote to Sir Joseph Hooker, offering to build a gallery if he would agree to display her life’s work in it. The gallery was duly built in a mix of classical and colonial styles.

Although the gallery originally opened in 1882, Marianne continued to travel the world for several years afterwards. The inner gallery and porch were constructed while she embarked on a trip to Australia and it was during her return from this continent that she decided to arrange her paintings in geographical order. This took her a year to accomplish and the gallery reopened in its final form in 1886.

Some facts and history......

Marianne North was an unmarried Victorian woman of comfortable means. Following the death of her father, she set off in 1871, aged 41, on the first of a series of trips to make a pictorial record of the tropical and exotic plants of the world.

Although she travelled around the world, often with letters of introduction to ambassadors, viceroys, rajahs and governors, whenever possible, she preferred to do her own thing. Frequently, she travelled to areas that the 'establishment' thought that she shouldn't visit and it was this independence of spirit that made her journeys one of the most reported subjects in the British newspapers of the period.

While in the USA, Marianne North was invited to dine at the White House by President Ulysses S Grant, who found her so fascinating that it was only at coffee afterwards he realised he had invited the wrong Miss North.

A number of plant species are named in her honour, including Areca northiana, Crinum northianum, Kniphofia northiana, Nepenthes northiana, and the genus name Northia.

Nepenthes northiana

Crinum northianum

  

On 26 September 2016, BBC 4 television station broadcast Kew's forgotten queen. The documentary told the story of North's life. Which I intend to watch!