Women Botanical Artists part 2

Her illustration of the stinkhorn, Phallus impudicus, is captured in her style of realistically-rendered color and a keen eye for texture. She gives equal care to the lifelike illustration of the juicy fruit and stem of the blackberry.

Using the shading of the head and stem, Hussey demonstrated her attention to minute detail and a passion for showing how plants look in their natural habitats. She even included a fly perched atop the plant for scale and context.

Hussey expertly juggled the duties of being the wife of a cleric and mother of six with her passion for mycology. By challenging the woman’s proper place in society during the Victorian era, she was a true feminist of her time.

Hussey’s illustration of Agaricus vellereus presents the fungus’ key anatomical features with extensive detail.

She did not shy away from illustrating dirt and rot, even as she crafted the fine gills of the mushroom.

Somewhat atypically, she ventured outside of her home to find her subjects, traveling to conventionally unladylike terrain she said was in “out-of-the-way wild places, far from carriage tracks.”

Moriarty wrote of the scarlet-flowered Crassula that “the richness of the colour” made it “much esteemed in the Green-house collection.”

She instructed readers on how to prune the stalks and branches, to use sandy compost, to water it infrequently in the winter, and to keep the plant out of the sun.

An editor of The Journal of Botany suggested that the images Moriarty published had not been drawn from life, but were in fact copied from other illustrations; the spellings of plant names were often incorrect, and her descriptions of plant and their cultivation methods were so sparse so as to suggest her lack of knowledge in gardening. Nevertheless, her drawings demonstrate her confident use of color and lines.

Moriarty was no gardening expert, but she did not allow this disadvantage to affect her artistry. Instead, she gathered information for other people—probably a female audience—to dip their toes in caring for plants.

Sarah Matilda Parry lived with her father at their estate, where she produced numerous watercolors of fruits he planted at their orchard between 1818 and up until her father’s death in 1822. Her painting career began long before she lived in Summer Hill and continued after her father’s death. Her work View on the River Wye was awarded the Silver Medal for Original Sketch from Nature by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in 1801.

Sarah Matilda Parry’s illustrations in Fruits from the Garden of Summer Hill include apples, which were one of her favorite fruit to illustrate. Her collection contained drawings of over 80 apple varieties and 42 pears.

Each illustration is annotated with the name and date of the painting, but a few are noteworthy for their inscriptions, which honor the memory of her father.

Her painting of the three cherries was painted in July 1822, on which she wrote, “The produce of these three trees my dear Father never saw.” He planted them in 1820.

Throughout her artwork, Parry pays a touching tribute to her father, in memory of the garden they had tended together.

Each of the watercolors in the Fruits of Lima are carefully labeled with the scientific and local names of the fruit. She includes the heights of plants and the size of leaves, as well as when they ripen.

Characteristic of all of her work, this frontispiece demonstrates Smith’s interest in contrasting various colors of fruits and vegetables.

The paintings go beyond depicting the exterior of fruit, displaying their interior features in full glory. Here, she painted the banana in different configurations, including a bunch still on the stalk and an overripe banana.

Unfinished like many of her works, this piece was passed down to her daughter, Isabella, after her husband bound and annotated her labors.

In The Virginian Flowering Maple, Hamilton depicts the blooming plant native to eastern and central North America. She expertly details the ridges of each branch and the veins of the maple leaves. Hamilton’s style is suggestive of Georg Ehret, Europe’s foremost botanical illustrator of the mid-eighteenth century.

For example, she includes inscriptions of plant names—with their scientific names—at the bottom right of each work. Given the pedigree of Hamilton’s family, historians have speculated a high likelihood that she, like her sister Bridget, had studied under the tutelage of the great artist.

The pearl-tongue aloe, native to Africa, has tubular red flowers that Ann delicately drew onto the gently-curving stalk, which grows out of the fleshy leaves at the base.

While Hamilton painted most of her samples against a plain background, some plants were depicted growing out of the ground, showing the type of soil used for its cultivation, as well as the scale of the plant.

Like Ehret, Hamilton utilized light backgrounds to highlight the plant itself, but still included the soil and base of plants in some of her works. Though little was known about her life, she created work that probably made her a memorable pupil.

Lady Frances Howard paid a great deal of attention to the shades of each part of the plant, including the leaves, on which she detailed their sharp edges, folds, and minuscule hairs.

Howard painted petals with unique precision, making the ends sharp and the colors vibrant and accurate.

She created lifelike flowers by also including buds, rather than a perfect and fully bloomed flower, in many of her pieces.

Though little was known about Howard’s life, she pored over her work for hours, demonstrating skills comparable to Ehret. Yet she added her own style when experimenting with rare blue paper, and studying the scientific backgrounds of plants. Her work, the only known collection in the world, is maintained by the Oak Spring Garden Foundation Library.

Much of Elizabeth’s work (signed “E.W.”) she left unfinished.

She drew specimens and parts of them on the side without coloring them in.

In the corners of her works, she included buds of rudimentary sketches of branches.

The sisters were not clear as to how their work was divided, but the pieces they painted together were completed and finely detailed. The fine hairs on each individual piece of the paintings showed the meticulous nature of their work.

Despite the mystery of their lives, the Oak Spring Garden Library maintains four manuscript volumes of the flowers, grasses, and seaweeds the sisters encountered and illustrated. At times Elizabeth would include where she spotted plants: sometimes she illustrated them “near Durham,” and at other times she was in the “Garden,” though she rarely or never included the locations when Margaret was involved. By examining the pieces’ locations, their records gift us a lens through which we can piece together the short history of their lives and work.