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Saturday 11 October 2008

Art in Kew

Ursula Buchan enjoys the botanical art in a new gallery at Kew

In the 19th century, the painting of flowers was mainly the preserve of maiden ladies with too much time on their hands, whose watercolours would be framed by indulgent brothers, and hung on bedroom walls. Scientific botanical painting was left to talented, poorly paid artists, whose work was reproduced in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine and other learned journals, or hidden in the fastnesses of botanic gardens, where it was studied by scientists in search of answers to plant taxonomic questions. Despite the rise in its status and visibility in recent years, even now there are people who believe that botanical art is an oxymoron; that the requirements for scientific accuracy inevitably undermine, even remove, the opportunities for artistic expression.

Anyone who wants to be reassured that this view is nonsense should make a trip to see the inaugural exhibition (until 19 October) at the new £3-million Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. This gallery is named after, and part-funded by, Dr Sherwood, erstwhile Oxford botanist and wife of the chairman of Orient-Express Hotels who, in less than 20 years, has built up a 700-strong collection of mainly watercolours by more than 200 contemporary flower painters and scientific artists, from all over the world. She must take at least some of the credit for what she calls ‘the renaissance’ that has occurred in botanical painting. In this gallery, the first anywhere to be given over entirely to this kind of art, a selection of her pictures will share the walls with some of the 200,000 drawings, paintings and prints which Kew possesses in its archives. The pictures displayed will be changed several times a year. Future themes include trees, and the art of plant evolution.

Botanical art, as opposed to more impressionistic flower painting, is painstakingly accurate, usually showing the parts of a plant and the stages of its development: seed, bud, flower, fruit, leaf, root, bulb. Yet the composition of those features can elevate its execution above mere accomplished draughtsmanship. Consider, for example, Bryan Poole’s hand-coloured copperplate etching of a fern frond — the way it arcs, shielding a frond still curled up in ‘crozier’ form — or his Tecomanthe speciosa, which shows flowers on a branch enclosed by a curling tendril, as well as successive stages in the life of a flower bud, appearing to fall like raindrops down the paper. Susan Ogilvy’s ‘cherries’ are like round red notes on an imaginary stave, while Pandora Sellars’s Glory lily seems blown by a warm tropical wind.

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