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Thursday 4 December 2008

Art in Kew

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

These are works by living artists but there is artistry also in the disposition of the leaves and flowers of the Stewartia malacodendron by Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708–1770), or the bold, true colour of Francis Bauer’s bird of paradise plant, Strelitzia augusta. The seemingly careless arrangement of the many polyanthus, cowslips and primroses in Maria Sibylla Merian’s painting, dating from the late 17th century, is as carefully wrought as the corrugated leaves in the central clump. (What is so remarkable about these early artists is that they worked with no more sophisticated optical aid than a hand lens.)

It is not easy to escape the conclusion that Nature herself is the greatest artist when you see how beautiful and congruous is the shape made by the branches of a palm tree, Livistona mauritiana, in a picture painted by an unknown Indian artist of the ‘Company school’ in the 19th century. Coral Guest (born 1955) may have added to the appeal of the Chilean bell flower, Lapageria rosea, by painting several lianes of flower and leaf curving sinuously down the paper, but that sinuous shape of leaf and flower are botanically accurate.

And what of the gallery, built to display these works? The building, by Walters and Cohen, is a cube, with a glazed front. It is designed as a ‘box within a box’, so that the inner space beyond the reception foyer is completely protected against damaging sunlight; the temperature is constant, the lighting is set low at 50 lux, and there is 55 per cent relative humidity. There are four side galleries, one of which extends as a corridor to the red-brick Marianne North Gallery next-door. This was built in 1882 and funded by the eponymous artist to house her overpoweringly colourful and closely hung collection of 832 flower paintings. The Shirley Sherwood Gallery is cleverly conceived, and makes a fine display space. Its glazed exterior means that it reflects the landscape around it, so it imposes little. It is only a pity, therefore, that the external face of the connecting corridor to the Marianne North Gallery looks rather blank and that the two buildings, though close neighbours, are not on speaking terms. Nevertheless, it is a cause for celebration that — two centuries after artists began to work there — Kew can, for the first time, show off the extraordinary riches of its art collection to the public, in concert with that of botanical art’s most important modern-day champion.

Treasures of Botanical Art: Icons from the Shirley Sherwood and Kew Collections by Shirley Sherwood and Martyn Rix is published by Kew Publishing (£24.95).

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