What is botanical art?
Kew has never gone a day without an artist in our ranks. And modern-day science still relies on this ancient tradition.
BY MERYL WESTLAKE
Imagine being able to paint every part of a living thing with incredible, microscopic detail, with every flick of a brush bringing the vibrancy of a petal to life?
Botanical illustration does just that. It is one of the most specific, and vital artforms that plays a major part in botanical discovery.
Every painting, or plate, that a trained botanical artist creates becomes the visual definition of its subject.
At Kew, this plate becomes cemented in history as part of our 200,000-strong botanical illustrative archive. This is a scientific tradition that dates back centuries.
In fact, Kew has never gone a day without a botanical artist in our ranks.
Echinopsis ancistrophora painted by Margaret Mee Fellowship Programme 2016. Scholar Alessandro Candido
What is botanical art used for?
Right back to the early botanists, the artist was often the first to officially document many of the plants we know today.
An illustration is used to support the work of botanists and horticulturists, describing the plant for the science records.
They appear in inventories, journals and field guides, but most importantly our artists’ plates are printed in the world’s longest running botanical magazine, Curtis’s Botanical Magazine – the definitive publication on botany and horticulture, and produced by Kew for over 200 years.
Published alongside a written description, the artist’s plate is part of the definition of a plant.
Maria Vorontsova, a taxonomist of Madagascan grasses, relies on botanical artists for her work.
‘Botanical artists are in fact scientific professionals. They help me identify grasses, which often have tiny spikelets and other small structures that I need to compare in order to understand what makes one grass different to another.
‘An illustration gives a better impression than my five pages of Latin text that goes alongside it! But it’s not just a communication tool, it is a scientific tool and absolutely essential.’
A pen and ink drawing of Vachellia anegadensis
See more here: https://www.kew.org/read-and-watch/what-is-botanic-art