Skip navigation

• Calendar of Events
• Travel Directions
• Hours and Admissions
• Visitor Information
• 
  
  
• Garden Accessibility
• Group Tours
• Map
• BBG Library

Home » Visiting » Explore the Garden » Steinhardt Conservatory Gallery

Introduction

"Everyone has many associations with a flower—the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower—lean forward to smell it—maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking—or give it to someone to please them. Still—in a way—nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small—we haven't time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small. So I said to myself—I'll paint what I see—what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it—I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers."

Georgia O'Keeffe

During the same decades that Georgia O'Keeffe was making the flower paintings that had such an immediate and lasting impact on the art world, Maud H. Purdy (1873–1965) was creating a series of paintings that also employed unexpected scale and an astonishing palette to make busy New Yorkers take time to see what she saw of flowers. But Purdy's original, expressive paintings have had virtually no impact on the art world. Is it because paintings of flowers created not just for their own sake but with scientific or pedagogical intent cannot be appreciated as art? Or, notwithstanding Georgia O'Keeffe, because flowers are regarded as too small a subject for "important" art, especially if they are painted to be recognizable? Or because, since the mid-19th century, this "minor" genre has been dominated by women who have been mostly ignored—even by feminist art critics in their reappraisals of women artists?

We are not surprised to find great floral art of the 17th through the early 19th centuries in museums, but connoisseurship rarely extends to botanical art made after that time. During the 19th century, botanical painting came to be regarded as either a drawing-room skill practiced by genteel women or as a handmaiden to the modern science of botany, which was becoming increasingly professionalized and male. Formalization in the scientific world of what signified a scientific illustration and in the art world of what signified a work of art created a widening gulf between the two. The idea that botanical art has two divergent branches—objective, analytic botanical illustration and subjective flower painting—is a 19th-century dichotomy; and a rigid, 19th-century world-view in a fluid 21st-century art world impedes full appreciation of art that takes flowers as its subject and represents them realistically, regardless of medium or purpose.

Drawing From Life features the work of 14 woman botanical artists from the first decades of the 20th century to the present, focusing on the forgotten work of Brooklyn Botanic Garden's staff artist for 32 years, Maud H. Purdy. The vitality of the genre in this age of mechanical reproduction may be a revelation for some. Side by side, works of the same or closely related subjects reveal how established conventions of botanical art are shaped both by fashions of the times and individual artistic visions. Paintings, scientific illustrations, herbarium specimens, preparatory sketches, and objects of material culture explore the boundaries between art, science, and craft.

Botanical art begins with the artist's deep affection for plants. Botanical artists record what they see, but what starts with close and precise observation of living and dried plants ends in art that represents something greater than what is observed. Artists use all their skills to capture the form, color, and texture of ephemeral beauty before it fades—or to revivify that which has faded—and to convey both the personality of the individual plant and the character of the ideal plant. In our contemporary culture, seeing is so often mediated that we have become either blind to the natural world or see it but lack the patience to understand it. For the botanical artist, the act of seeing a plant is complete when its life is understood and conveyed in the image. Botanical art, then, offers an important challenge to our way of "seeing" the world that surrounds us and persuades us to take the time to see flowers—really.

The "Best Botany Illustrator in America"

Maud Purdy was born in Philidelphia in 1873 and received her first instruction in art at the Philadelphia Institute of Art. In the mid-1880s her father, who was a successful doctor, moved the family to Brooklyn, and Purdy lived the rest of her life there and in Rockland County, New York. Purdy graduated from Pratt Institute and, presumably with her father's financial support, opened a salon on Bedford Avenue near the school, where she offered instruction to young women in watercolor and oil painting, portrait miniatures, and painting on china.

Despite the popularity of her salon, Purdy gave up teaching in 1900 in order to concentrate on plein air landscapes and portrait miniatures, for which there was great demand. She spent summers in New Jersey, Connecticut, and the Berkshires painting out-of-doors, and in 1902, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that although her subjects had been "flowers principally," she had produced a promising group of landscapes and that "her new field of work is likely to be a notable one." Purdy continued to paint landscapes of woods and fields and hills throughout her life, but none displayed either the technical virtuosity of her Ruskinian truth-to-nature paintings of floral subjects or the visual excitement of the work she later produced for Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

In 1913—the year that the New York Armory Show created a sensation in the art world—Purdy exchanged her artistic autonomy and early critical success for a position as staff artist at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It was not uncommon at that time for natural science illustrators, principally women, to be employed by major scientific institutions. Since it was his ambition to build a botanical institution of the first rank, the Garden's charismatic first director, Charles Stuart Gager, made it an early priority to hire an illustrator. Purdy would hold that position for 32 years.

In 1951, Montague Free, who was one of the most popular horticulturists of the day, pronounced Maud Purdy the "best botany illustrator in America." Purdy was then 78 years old and had been retired for six years from her position at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. She had produced an extraordinary visual complement to the work of the Garden's botanists and horticulturists, but outside the context of her male colleagues' publications, Purdy's paintings had no critical reception and were exhibited infrequently. As those botanists' and horticulturists' achievements were eclipsed by more current discoveries and trends, her work, which was so closely associated with theirs, was forgotten.

Studying Irises, Painting Rainbows

One of the earliest gardens to be developed at Brooklyn Botanic Garden was the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden, which opened to the public in June 1915, the month of hana-shobu, or Japanese iris. A section of the eastern shore of the pond was planted with irises, but not, at first, with the iconic beardless Japanese varieties. 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 by a decade later, more than 500 varieties of Japanese iris bloomed at Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Maud Purdy began documenting the test varieties in 1925. She continued painting irises each June during their short bloom period and produced 40 paintings in four years (there are no paintings dated 1928). When other projects demanded Purdy's time, Louise Mansfield (1876–1970), who had studied with impressionist Charles Webster Hawthorne and Robert Henri (founder of the Ashcan school), stepped in and ultimately painted over 150 irises between 1927 and 1936 in precisely the style and format employed by Purdy.

The 11.5 × 8.5-inch illustration board comfortably accommodated a life-size head-and-shoulders portrait of a fully open, five- to six-inch-wide, ruffled flower; a closed bud; and the top four to six inches of flower stems and leaves. Like Purdy's portrait miniatures that focused on her sitters' faces and expressions, these paintings record the often subtle distinguishing features and lush colors of the blooms. Purdy's brushstrokes were more delicate and her colors more finely applied than Mansfield's, but the paintings' uniformity of style and materials form a consistent collection that would have been well suited to a publication that Gager planned but never realized.

The paintings were, however, exhibited: A selection of 60 Japanese irises and 45 species irises by Purdy and Mansfield were shown at A Century of Progress, the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, and again in the Gardens on Parade exhibition hall at the New York World's Fair in 1939 and 1940.

Heritage Crabapples Flowering Through Time

During the second half of the 19th century, many important crabapples were introduced to the United States from Japan. By 1934, when Maud Purdy began a series of 19 paintings of crabapples, many of these varieties were well established at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and several picturesque trees in the Garden's current living collections were probably Purdy's models. Once again, she painted on 11.5 × 8.5-inch illustration board, and it seems (by correspondence he had with a prospective publisher) that Charles Stuart Gager had hoped to release these as a folio of loose plates. Unfortunately, as with the iris paintings, their publication was never funded, but six of the crabapple watercolors, along with other works by Purdy, were included in a 1935 Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibition of paintings of natural history subjects.

Purdy arranged most of these works in the same way: with a fruiting branch in the top half of the painting and a flowering branch at the bottom. She usually placed the branches horizontally on the page and parallel to each other, balancing the weight of the fruit at the top by painting long flowering branches filled with open blossoms and buds. All of them were executed with great delicacy and beauty as well as with complete botanical accuracy. With leaves turning and fruit and flowers dangling on long pedicels, there is a lot of movement in these paintings, but in almost all there is a space in the center where the gaze can rest on emptiness and yet take in all of the detail that Purdy has included.

Microscopes and Drawings: The Nexus of Botany and Art

In 1927, Maud Purdy was appointed Brooklyn Botanic Garden's "curatorial assistant for microscopic work and drawings." Garden botanist Alfred Gundersen anticipated that his research would be "greatly aided by the appointment," as he wrote in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record (April 1928), and he was not disappointed. Purdy was exceptionally productive, and within seven years she had drawn more than 200 species in nearly 200 genera for Gundersen. In addition to her analytic pencil and watercolor and pen-and-ink illustrations, Purdy created her most innovative and visually thrilling paintings as a result of the work she did for Gundersen during the next two decades. The world Purdy saw through her microscope and powerful hand lens had a profound effect on her art.

Drawing the interior and exterior of things under magnification was something quite different in the 20th century than it had been nearly 400 years earlier, when the first book to use the microscope for botanical illustration was published (De Florum Cultura Libri IV, by Giovanni Battista Ferrari, Rome, 1633). Increasingly, what science learned about plants seemed inexpressible in images, and words were trusted to convey the truth of nature. Yet the creative nexus of artist and botanist is enduring: The artist's ability to see and technique to record the most minute details of things has remained a critical part of the botanist's process of describing new plants.

Beginning in the early 1920s (perhaps before, although there is nothing in the collection with an earlier date), Purdy kept detailed sketchbooks with color notes, observations, and dates on which the sketches were made. These were mostly research drawings organized by family and genus for Brooklyn Botanic Garden's botanists.

The same 1935 Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibition that included Purdy's crabapples also included six black-and-white ink illustrations of the plants of the 1930 Astor Expedition to the Galapagos and Cocos islands. During this expedition, Henry K. Svenson collected more than 300 species, including a few new to science, and Purdy illustrated these plants from dried specimens with precision and vigor for Svenson's publication in the American Journal of Botany in 1935.

Purdy drew one of Svenson's new plants, Luffa astorii, climbing into the drawing from the lower left corner, up the left edge, and out of the drawing, only to reappear in the upper right corner with a distinctive luffa fruit suspended from the vine. Just above the fruit is a single flower, and below it is a magnification of the fruit's network of fibers. The organization of the plants on the page is done with great aesthetic success and harmony of form.

An Alchemical Transformation

Two contemporary artists, Bobbi Angell, the first American to receive the Linnean Society's prestigious Jill Smythies Prize for published illustrations, and Alice Tangerini, staff illustrator since 1972 in the Department of Botany at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, must be counted among the handful of scientific illustrators who consistently achieve an almost alchemical transformation of the dried specimens they work with. When they breathe life into a plant, you see the plant—not just the skill required to draw it. To do this rigorous and intricate drawing so well requires not just excellent draftsmanship but a thorough knowledge of botany. Tangerini, in fact, once realized what a botanist had not: that a Venezuelan pineapple she was drawing was a new species.

Like Purdy, Angell and Tangerini have developed close and long relationships with botanists, but, Angell writes, "I do not let the botanist's observations bias me against my own interpretations, so that I view everything with a clear perspective." Tangerini often spends a week studying a plant before she begins drawing, and both artists use whatever resources they can get—photographs and pickled plants, as well as botanists' verbal descriptions—to aid their extraordinary reconstructions. The complexity of just part of the process that Angell describes would overwhelm most artists:

I gently boil one or two flowers in water and glycerin to rehydrate them for dissection, and then sketch them freehand as seen under a dissecting microscope, using tweezers and scalpel to carefully section the flowers. Everything is measured accurately with micrometer and millimeter ruler. It is a delicate balance to interpret what is going on within a flower, while simultaneously dissecting, measuring, and sketching it onto paper. I am always awed by the beauty of a full blossom, but it is the hidden detail revealed by the microscope that has the greatest appeal, and it is this that has kept me working with herbarium specimens year after year, for a couple of thousand different species.

Each artist has techniques and tools that give her work a distinctive style (Tangerini uses small brushes as well as pen and often attaches a camera lucida to her microscope), but they have in common the ability to organize discrete illustrations of all a plant's defining features clearly and dynamically on a page. They demonstrate that it is possible for black-and-white line illustration both to fulfill its scientific purpose, following strict conventions, and to be beautiful.

Form and Color

Buds open, then close. Colors fade. Blooms collapse. Petals fall. Artists who draw plants from life vie with senescence by producing numerous sketches of their subjects, usually from many angles.

Maud Purdy's gouache paintings on black illustration board are the most electrifying of her work, and their development can be traced in her sketchbooks and research watercolors. Purdy recorded every defining part of a flower's structure and returned to add detail to the sketch page as a tightly closed flower bud opened or a seedpod developed and ripened. She organized hundreds of pages of these analytic drawings by order, family, and genus and held them together with metal binder clips between simple ledger covers. The artist demonstrated her aesthetic control in the finished works, where she unified as many as 12 meticulously observed studies of flowers magnified from 2 to 14 times into elegant compositions that are modernist in their emphasis on form and color.

Purdy looked at plants with her naked eye, and then she looked at them again under a microscope. She sliced them open to reveal their internal structures and painted every part with precision. She presented flowers head on with crisply outlined edges in intense colors that glowed against their black backgrounds. Arranged around the flowers, like jewels containing a mysterious inner light, she painted magnified pearlescent ovules and deeply faceted seeds. For scale, flowers often appear in the upper left corners depicted at actual size (as in the rockrose, 'Heavenly Blue' morning glory, and Thanksgiving cactus); but it is with magnification that one sees the amazing intricacies of floral morphology.

Produced over nearly two decades, these gouaches were used for education and to illustrate botanical lectures, particularly Alfred Gundersen's lectures on his theories of plant evolution and kinship relationships. In the details, Purdy's paintings portray the extraordinary diversity of floral form and reproductive structure, and yet, in the whole, they are intriguingly abstract. Lush colors seem to vibrate against velvety black backgrounds, making these paintings seem sensual as well as scientific.

Wandtafeln

Purdy's use of a black background instead of white was a reversal of one of the most universal conventions in the botanical art canon. One must look back nearly 300 years to find a botanical artist who consistently painted on a dark background: Barbara Regina Dietzsch (1706–1783), a well-known Nuremburg painter, set off her floral subjects on dark backgrounds. At the time, little had been written about Dietzsch, and we do not know if Purdy was acquainted with her work; beyond dark backgrounds, these works otherwise have little in common. The question, then, is what is the historical antecedent for this approach?

Botanical wall charts, which originated in the last quarter of the 19th century in Germany, were popular classroom teaching tools into the middle of the 20th century. Among the best-known artists of these charts were Heinrich Jung, G. von Koch, and F. Quentell, and one of the distinctive features of the Jung-Koch-Quentell charts is that they were on black backgrounds (indeed, a wall chart is known as wandtafeln, or "blackboard"). The popularity of these charts at the time makes it likely that Purdy knew them; and their dramatic impact in a lecture hall may have influenced her work. In 1922, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Library acquired a copy of The Botanical Atlas: A Guide to the Practical Study of Plants by Daniel McAlpine (Edinburgh, 1883), which Purdy surely saw. McAlpine owed much in the creation of his illustrations to the wandtafeln, so it is instructive to compare Purdy's painting of a sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) to illustrations of conifers in McAlpine's atlas and a linden in a Jung-Koch-Quentell chart. In addition to sharing black backgrounds, the wall chart and Purdy's painting have no explanatory text, which focuses the eye on the plant forms. It is tempting to conclude that the function of her paintings as visual aids in botanical lectures dictated the artist's choices, but Purdy's paintings are more than poster art. Her composition, palette, and use of black backgrounds, if not entirely unconventional, were more than utilitarian choices. She had developed a personal approach to the aesthetic presentation of her subject and created works of unusual beauty that also served science.

The Magnolia and Tea Families

In 1950, Alfred Gundersen published a proposed revision of the classification and arrangement of flowering plants, Families of Dicotyledons—the result of his career exploring phylogenetic relationships. (At the time, Gundersen himself cautioned that his arrangement could only be tentative, and today DNA sequencing has resulted in major revisions of the tree of life.) Maud Purdy's sketchbooks, compiled over nearly 30 years and organized to reflect Gundersen's classification, were the basis of the extensive illustrations for his book. Gundersen had rearranged 42 orders and 240 families into 10 main groups, including a Magnolia Group and a Tea Group. While this organization is no longer valid, the magnolia and tea families are still recognized, and Purdy's sketches and paintings are as botanically true and visually compelling today as they were 70 years ago.

Nomenclature has changed over time, but the paintings and sketches of plants in the magnolia family by Purdy in the 1930s, by Anne Ophelia Dowden in 1960 and 1982, by Jessica Tcherepnine in 2002, and by Angela Mirro in 2007 are striking visual demonstrations of the structural similarities of the flowers and fruits of these trees. The paintings are also an expression of each artist's intimate relationship with the plant that she painted from life: The result is work as different as Tcherepnine's painting of the same woody seedpod in each of four stages of ripening and Mirro's of the waxy, tactile petals of the large flowers at the very moment before their collapse.

Both Purdy's 1935 painting of a Franklin tree and Dianne McElwain's 2006 painting of a stewartia depict characteristic ruffled white petals cupping the numerous stamens typical of the tea family, but Purdy looks inside the cramped quarters of the tightly packed flower bud before it opens, while McElwain captures the graceful dance of leaves, buds, and flowers.

Pitchers and Other Carnivores

Carnivorous plants have as secure a place in popular culture as they do in botany, and although not as notorious as Venus flytrap, pitcher plants (Sarracenia species) are the largest and most spectacular of North American carnivorous plants. Maud Purdy painted the topsy-turvy bloom of Sarracenia flava with its floppy, acid-yellow petals inviting bees to visit. In contrast, Francesca Anderson rendered the very plump, veined pitchers (modified leaves) of S. purpurea in black and white and included an X-ray view inside one reservoir, where a cockroach has drowned in digestive fluid. S. flava blooms in early spring and then sends up its carnivorous leaves in late spring and early summer. Carol Woodin painted the pitchers first and then the flower in the following year. Although there is no cross section or X-ray view, the fleshiness hinting at carnivory is captured flawlessly on translucent vellum.

---

1000 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11225 · 718-623-7200 | Copyright © 2009 BBG
Contact BBG · Directions · Conditions of Use · Privacy Policy · Accessibility Statement · Site Map