Marianne North Gallery at Kew Gardens – beautiful botanical paintings

When I first visited the Marianne North Gallery at Kew Gardens a couple of years ago, I was completely entranced not only by the beautiful botanical paintings that filled the gallery from floor to ceiling, but with the story of this redoubtable Victorian lady who loved to travel as much as she loved to paint.

At the time, the gallery was about to close for renovation, so I didn’t do anything with the photos I’d taken, but having recently revisited the gallery again, I was struck by how Marianne North might be likened to a travel blogger of her time, and want to share her story and paintings with you.

My husband gave me a lovely book (A Vision of Eden) filled with her botanical paintings, journal entries and stories from each of her extended trips, to the United States, Brazil, Japan, South Africa, the Seychelles, Borneo, Australia, New Zealand and Chile. Each of her journeys is illustrated by paintings of the scenery and plants of these strange and exotic lands, captured in the days when photography was just in its infancy and she regularly enjoyed the hospitality of strangers, introduced by letters from friends, in the days before the term couch-surfing had been dreamed up.

Marianne North was born in 1830 into a prosperous family who divided their time between the family estate in Norfolk, London and Hastings where her father was a Member of Parliament. She was educated with her sister mainly by governesses and at the age of 20 she took up painting, a popular means of passing the time, for young ladies of her background.

In 1855 Marianne’s mother died and she made Marianne promise never to leave he father, a promise which she kept, accompanying him after her mother’s death on his travels through the Pyrenees, the Alpine valleys around Mont Blanc, Hungary, Constantinople and Trieste.

She was encouraged by her friends to start a journal of their travels, illustrated with pen and ink drawings. In 1865 when her father lost his his seat in the General Election they embarked upon another extended voyage through Greece and on to Beirut and Damascus including a voyage down the Nile.

When, at the age of 40, Marianne North’s father died she set off again on a succession of journeys to satisfy her curiosity and overcome her grief, and soon found that she had a taste for travelling alone. First she sailed in 1871 for the United States, to stay with a friend in Massachusetts, and enjoyed painting the autumn trees and the Niagara Falls.

She visited New York and Washington where she was introduced to President Grant and invited for dinner at the White house where the President “gave me some curious accounts of the few remaining Indians who sit in a circle and beat down the grasshoppers with whips, gather them up and crush them in their hands, eating them just as they are.”

As autumn turned to winter, Marianne North fled the cold and sailed for Jamaica, arriving on Christmas Eve 1871 and rented a house in a wild, overgrown garden with heliotropes and lemon verbenas, working on her botanical paintings under the giant cotton trees. She travelled around the island too, socialising with local families, hindered only by the rats who ate holes in her boots “which were very precious and not easily replaced, so I always put them on top of the water jug during the rest of my stay on the island”

In 1872-73 she was in Brazil, reporting with enthusiasm, “once I saw a spider as big as a small sparrow with velvet paws; and everywhere were marvellous webs and nests. How could such a land be dull?”

Between 1875 she was in Madeira, California and on to Japan where she secured a “special order from the Mikado to sketch for 3 months as much as I liked in Kyoto, provided I did not scribble on the public monuments or try to convert the people, for it was a closed place to Europeans”

In 1876 she sailed again for Borneo and Java where she reported ” The forest was a perfect world of wonders and there were great metallic arums with leaves two feet long, graceful trees over the streams with scarlet bark all hanging in tatters and such huge black apes! One of these seemed to be watching us and followed us a long while. When we stopped he stopped, staring at us with all his might from behind some branch or tree trunk.”

Marianne North returned via Ceylon where she reported that she had seen “the first live snake I had seen in Ceylon. I went in to breakfast one morning and on my return saw a beautiful bright-green thing waving in the wind. My spectacles not being on, I thought that someone had put down some new grass or plant for me and put my hand out to take it, when it darted off. Since that day I have always worn spectacles and have seen no more live snakes.”

Between 1877-79 she visited India where those “unthinking crocheting-badminton young ladies always aggravated me and I could scarcely be civil to them” and when she went up to Amritsar, she found the Golden Temple “a real gem, half marble lace work, and half gilt copper, with rich dark hangings and carpets, built out in the middle of a clear lake, smooth as glass, in which every line was accurately reflected”.

In 1880 when she returned to England, Marianne North wrote to her friend Sir Joseph Hooker, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, offering to build a gallery to contain her collection of botanical painting, and when her offer was accepted, she carefully chose the site and engaged an architect to design the house. She also met with Charles Darwin who told her that “I ought not to attempt any representation of the vegetation of the world until I had seen and painted the Australian, which was so unlike that of any other country. I determined to take it as a royal command and to go at once.”

In 1881, most of Marianne’s time was spent arranging her new gallery, with the framing and ordering of paintings, the motifs around the doorways and the dado made up of different coloured woods that she had collected on the travels. The gallery was opened in 1882 with over 800 of Marianne North’s paintings and in an era before photography, enabled visitors to marvel at the rich flora and fauna and scenery of the places she had visited.

Now, following a major restoration, the leaking roof and structure has been repaired, the floors relaid to the original tiles and the pictures restored and rehung, to ensure they are not at risk from damp and humidity. Since I first visited, a small exhibition room has been opened at one side of the gallery, with audiovisual displays about Marianne’s life and travels and a passageway opened to lead to the adjoining modern Shirley Sherwood Gallery, with more botanical paintings.

If you visit Kew Gardens, do be sure to take a look at Marianne North’s colourful and exotic paintings packed into this gallery like a jewel box. If you also get the chance to read the stories of her travels, I hope you’ll be as inspired as I was by this intrepid Victorian lady’s enthusiasm, good humour and curiosity for all that the world had to offer. She was surely a travel blogger before her time, don’t you think?

Visitor Information for the Marianne North gallery at Kew Gardens

Information about the Marianne North gallery on the Kew Gardens Website

If you are interested in Marianne North and her painting you may be interested in these books about her life and work. A Vision of Eden is the hardback book that I have with Marianne North’s own account of her travels, while Marianne North, a very intrepid painter is a beautifully illustrated paperback book of her life and travels.

More things to enjoy in Kew and Richmond

Henry Moore at Kew Gardens
The View from Richmond Hill
Down by the river in Richmond

This article is originally published at Heatheronhertravels.com 

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