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Home » Scientific Research » Brooklyn Botanic Garden Library » Special Collections

Maud H. Purdy

Drawing From Life, Imagining Plants

In 1951, Montague Free, one of the most popular horticulturists of the day, pronounced Maud H. Purdy (1873–1965) the "best botany illustrator in America." Purdy was then 78 years old and had been retired for six years from her position as staff artist at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. For 32 years, she had collaborated with Brooklyn Botanic Garden's botanists and horticulturists to produce an extraordinary visual complement to their work. As their contributions to science and horticulture were eclipsed by more current discoveries and trends, however, Purdy's paintings, which were so closely associated with their work, were forgotten. Furthermore, Abstract Expressionism was the art of mid-century America, representational art was scorned, and botanical art was hardly considered art at all. Now, 60 years later, Brooklyn Botanic Garden's goal in digitizing 235 of Purdy's paintings, illustrations, and sketches is to rescue the artist's original, often daring work from obscurity and make it available for study and appreciation by a public almost entirely unacquainted with it.

When the first edition of the Art of Botanical Illustration was published in 1950, "it seemed reasonable to believe that the great days of botanical illustration lay behind us," wrote William T. Stearn in that book's 1994 edition, "and that, in the future, the drawing of flowers would become little more than a by-product of science." Today there is an unprecedented flourishing of botanical art, and that assessment has proven to be well off the mark. As a new appreciation of both contemporary and classical botanical art emerges, it is useful to consider how the art world's embrace of modernism in the early decades of the 20th century affected botanical art, particularly Purdy's, and how gender influenced her artistic and professional choices. These themes, among others, will be explored in an exhibit scheduled for fall 2007, " Maud H. Purdy and Ninety Years of Women Artists Drawing From Life at Brooklyn Botanic Garden."

Maud Purdy was born in Philadelphia in 1873 and studied at the Philadelphia Institute of Art before moving with her family to Brooklyn around 1890. She lived most of her life in Brooklyn and Rockland County, New York. Her family was comfortably upper middle class, but, like other late-19th-century "new women," she asserted her independence by pursuing a career. She opened a salon on Bedford Avenue near Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she offered instruction to young women in watercolor and oil painting, portrait miniatures, and painting on china. By 1894, the Brooklyn Eagle was publishing enthusiastic notices of Purdy's and her students' work exhibited at Purdy's studio. She also designed textiles, and one critic was particularly taken by a very large tapestry that she designed, based on a work by the Spanish painter Francisco Pradilla Ortiz (1848–1921), saying that her translation from a small engraving was "a free and graceful one."

Purdy also took commissions, particularly for miniature watercolor portraits on ivory. Although portrait painting was still a popular luxury among the upper classes, photography was rapidly replacing it, and many painters of miniatures even imitated photographic effects in their work. Purdy painted this portrait from life in watercolor on ivory, which was photographed and published in 1914, after the death of its subject, Franklin W. Hooper, first director of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record, Vol. III, No.4, October 1914).

During the last years of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, when William Merritt Chase dominated the art taught in American academies, Purdy pursued her studies further at Adelphi College and Pratt Institute and with private teachers in Manhattan. She continued to produce ceramics decorated with precisely rendered flowers, which were very popular among visitors to her studio. In 1900 she gave up teaching in order to concentrate on her portrait commissions and plein air painting. She spent summers in New Jersey, Connecticut, and the Berkshires painting out-of-doors. In 1902, the Brooklyn Eagle noted that although her subjects had been "flowers principally," she had produced a promising group of landscapes that year. Brooklyn Botanic Garden has no landscapes in its collection, although she did paint out-of-doors at the Garden.

Purdy was hired by Brooklyn Botanic Garden in September 1913, probably by Charles Stuart Gager, the Garden's first director. In January 1914, Gager made that year's most substantial request for funds—for "the preparation of botanical illustrations in large quantities." (Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record, Vol. III, No. 1, January 1914). Purdy was already at work producing illustrations for Gager's Fundamentals of Botany, which was published in 1916, and continued to produce illustrations for the articles and books of the Garden's botanists and horticulturists until the early 1950s. Among the books were Families of Dicotyledons, by Alfred Gundersen, Illustrated Guide to Trees and Shrubs, by Arthur Harmount Graves, and All About African Violets and All About Houseplants, by Montague Free.

In 1920, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, in cooperation with the American Iris Society, established a test garden for the study of Japanese irises. George Matthew Reed was hired in 1921 and put in charge of the project, and Purdy was asked to make the illustrations. Gager noted in the Garden's 1925 annual report that although only a few illustrations could be executed per year because of the irises' comparatively short bloom period, Purdy had devoted most of her time during their bloom in 1925 to preparing "very excellent illustrations." Seven paintings in the collection are dated that year, including 'Oyodo'. Nineteen twenty-seven was apparently Purdy's most productive year for the iris project: BBG holds paintings of 16 varieties, including six species irises. She continued painting irises until 1929, when other scientific projects demanded more of her attention. A total of 40 paintings of irises are currently in BBG's collection. The project was carried on by Purdy's colleague Louise Mansfield, and a selection of iris paintings by Purdy and Mansfield were exhibited at A Century of Progress—the 1933 Chicago World's Fair—and in the "Gardens on Parade" exhibition hall at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

In 1922, Alfred Gundersen, then the associate curator of plants, installed an exhibition in the conservatory illustrating plant evolution—an antecedent of the current Stephen K-M. Tim Trail of Evolution at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Since the mid-19th century, natural history had become a popular entertainment. Static cabinets of curiosities were replaced by pictorial constructions of nature. Increasingly complex and lavish dioramas were produced (One of the most lavish, the recently restored Andros Coral Reef diorama at the American Museum of Natural History, was begun during this period and not completed until 1933). Understanding the appeal of such displays, Gager announced his intention to enhance Gundersen's horticultural exhibit by installing scenes of prehistory and making it of "unusual educational value for school classes as well as for the general public." Under Gunderson's supervision, Purdy created a series of pictorial landscape scenes of fossil plants, and in June 1932, transparencies of eight of her illustrations were put in place in the conservatory. In addition, a special illustrated guide to the exhibit, "The Story of Fossil Plants," by Edward W. Berry, was published (Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record, Vol. XXI, No. 4, July 1932). Purdy's original work was later exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1935, as part of an exhibition of paintings of natural history subjects.

Also included in that exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art were six watercolors of crabapples from a series that Purdy drew in charming but conservative style from BBG's living collection and six ink illustrations of the plants of the 1930 Astor Expedition to the Galapagos and Cocos Islands. BBG botanist Henry K. Svenson collected more than 300 species, including a few new to science. In 1933–34, from Svenson's dried specimens, Purdy painted these plants with precision and vigor for their publication in the American Journal of Botany in 1935. For a brief history of the Astor Expedition and to search the Astor Expedition collection online, visit The Astor Expedition to the Galapagos (1930). The carmine crabapple (Malus × atrosanguinea) is now rare in the nursery trade, but BBG's living collection has several old, picturesque trees that were probably Purdy's models.

Beginning in the early 1920s (or perhaps before, although there is nothing in the collection that has an earlier date), Purdy kept detailed sketchbooks with color notes, observations, and precise dates on which the sketches were made. The development of many of Purdy's finished paintings can be traced in her sketchbooks.

Among the earliest sketches are several species of Frankenia, a genus of shrubby heathlike seaside plants that Alfred Gundersen was studying for his classification of flowering plants. In 1927, Purdy was appointed "curatorial assistant for microscopic work and drawings." Gundersen anticipated that the artist would "greatly aid his research," and he was not disappointed: Purdy's most innovative and visually thrilling work was a result of the illustrations she did for him during the next two decades. The world Purdy saw through a microscope and powerful hand lens had a profound affect on her art. Although nearly contemporaneous, Purdy's genteel crabapple paintings with their delicate color palette share only precision of drawing with her bold gouache paintings on black board. The crabapples and irises might have served as decoration for the hand-painted ceramic vases and tea sets Purdy produced while Rookwood pottery was in vogue, but the vibrant palette and frankly painted interior parts of plants were more modernist than Ruskinian. In July 1943, Gundersen obtained a fresh plant of Frankenia grandifolia [F. salina] from California, and Purdy completed a color study immediately.

The gouache paintings, which appear to have been done over nearly two decades, were used for lectures and education (although several were reproduced without color in BBG publications), and the ink illustrations were intended for scientific publications. It is tempting to conclude that function dictated the artist's choices, but Purdy had clearly developed a personal, expressive response to her subject: Her scale, composition, and use of black, rather than white, background were unconventional, even avant-garde choices. These paintings are sensual, not simply descriptive and imitative—not, in fact, a mere "by-product of science" but fully realized works of art.

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