New Book | Drawn from Nature: The Flowering of Irish Botanical Art
The related exhibition was on view in Dublin at the National Gallery of Ireland in 2020. Forthcoming from ACC:
Patricia Butler, Drawn from Nature: The Flowering of Irish Botanical Art (Woodbridge: ACC Art Books, 2023), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1788842365, £35 / $40.
For centuries, artists of all disciplines have expressed delight in nature through the highly skilled and captivating medium of botanical art. The distinguished contributions of Irish botanical artists include records of plants from 17th-century Ireland, early illustrated floras, and botanical art found in the field of design. Drawn from Nature: The Flowering of Irish Botanical Art also covers the importance of botanical art to the Ordnance Survey of Ireland during the 19th century, as well as the vital plant portraits produced by Irish women. These portraits assisted generations of botanists in understanding and describing the natural world but received scant recognition. Published for the first time, these outstanding examples of Irish botanical art, from both public and private collections, demonstrate a shared desire by botanical artists to observe, illuminate, and record Ireland’s unique flora. This book finally affords them the recognition they deserve.
Patricia Butler is an art historian and gardener. The author of Irish Botanical Illustrators & Flower Painters (2000), she curated the exhibition Drawn from Nature: Irish Botanical Art, on view in Dublin at the National Gallery of Ireland in 2020. She owns the historic garden at Dower House, Rossanagh, Ashford, Co Wicklow.
New Book | A Curious Herbal
From Abbeville Press (Lauren Moya Ford’s review of the book can be found at HyperAllergic). . . .
Marta McDowell and Janet Stiles Tyson, eds., A Curious Herbal: Elizabeth Blackwell’s Pioneering Masterpiece of Botanical Art (New York: Abbeville Press, 2023), 576 pages, ISBN: 978-0789214539, £60 / $75.
A complete edition of the first herbal published by a woman artist—which has a remarkable backstory.
In the 1730s, Elizabeth Blackwell (1699–c. 1758) found herself penniless, with her ne’er-do-well husband confined to a London debtor’s prison. A talented artist, she came up with a unique and ambitious moneymaking scheme: the publication of a new illustrated guide to medicinal plants, including many New World species not depicted in earlier books. Blackwell’s Curious Herbal, published between 1737 and 1739, was hailed for its usefulness to doctors and apothecaries and met with considerable financial success. This magnificent volume—the first modern edition of Blackwell’s herbal—reproduces all five hundred of her exquisite plates. Blackwell not only made the drawings, but prepared the copper plates and personally hand-colored the prints. Her handwritten descriptions of the plants, which she creatively adapted (with permission) from Joseph Miller’s Botanicum Officinale, retain considerable interest. This book features a previously unknown preface by Blackwell, in which she reveals her passion for art and nature, and her vision for the herbal. Two introductory texts contextualize Blackwell’s achievement: the noted garden writer Marta McDowell explores the history of herbals as a genre and the state of botanical knowledge in Blackwell’s time, and the historian Janet Stiles Tyson relates the artist’s rather extraordinary biography.
Marta McDowell is a gardener, lecturer, and horticultural writer. Her books include All the Presidents’ Gardens (2016) and Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life (2013), winner of the Gold Award from the Garden Writers Association.
Janet Stiles Tyson, an independent scholar, wrote her doctoral dissertation on Elizabeth Blackwell’s Curious Herbal.
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