Flowers of the Amazon Forest: The Botanical Art of Margaret Mee - Hardcover

Brown, Margaret Ursula

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1905377061 ISBN 13: 9781905377060

Publisher: Antique Collectors Club Dist, 2006

Synopsis

Margaret Mee must rank as one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth century. She was an intrepid explorer of the Brazilian rainforest and an outstanding botanical artist, acclaimed by botanists and art critics worldwide. At the age of 47 Mee started exploring the Amazon, travelling throughout the wildest parts of Amazonia for the next thirty years. Mee learned to live with the forest and its plants, animals and people and learnt much from the Native people about the trees and plants she so meticulously painted. Mee initially sketched the plants in the forest and then worked on the large illustrations of the entire plant in her studio in Rio de Janeiro. Nine of these plants recorded by Mee, previously unknown to science, are now named after her. Flowers of the Amazon Forests: The Botanical Art of Margaret Mee illustrates more than sixty of Mee's major works with additional sketches painted while in the forest. The text is taken directly from the diaries she kept whilst travelling, giving

About this title

About the Author:

Margaret Mee (1909-1988) worked as a draughtsman for De Havilland during the Second World War and afterwards retrained at St. Martin's School of Art and Camberwell School of Art where she studied under Victor Pasmore. Her first of many expeditions to the waterways of Amazonia was in 1956 when she was forty-seven; her last was in 1988, aged seventy-nine. She was tragically killed in a road accident in England. Recognition of her work came in the form of financial support from the Brazilian government, the National Geographic Society and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1976 she was awarded an M.B.E., and in 1979 the Order of Cruzeiro do Sul (Brazil) for her services to botanical research.

Review:

"On seeing her paintings for the first time. Wilfred Blunt, author of The Art of Botanical Illustration said: "...they are splendid, magnificently composed, superbly reproduced... can stand without shame in the high company of such eighteenth-century masters as Georg Dionysius Ehret and Redoute"

About this edition

• Publisher: Antique Collectors Club Dist
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1905377061
• ISBN 13: 9781905377060
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160