The life and work of Marianne North, the eminent Victorian botanical artist, is well documented. Do we need another book about her? Michelle Payne provides a positive answer in this well-illustrated volume. She aims to modify the dominant image of North as an intrepid lone traveler to the many sites of her art, to show us a different, fuller picture. North always had a cast of helpers around her and benefited from her colonial connections.
Between 1871 and 1885 North traveled to 15 countries in Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas. The book presents her trips in chronological order, using substantial excerpts from North’s journals. Along with a few examples of the stunning botanical art North is famous for, Payne includes many of North’s impressionistic paintings of landscapes, cities, and buildings she visited, and a few photographs of the journal pages themselves.
The journals record North’s interactions with the many people who hosted her, and her reactions, sometimes amused. Here she describes a formal dinner for fifty in India: “. . . Lady L. herself so hung with artificial flowers that she made quite a crushing sound whenever she sat down” [p. 169].
She also tells of her less comfortable accommodations, this one in Tenerife: “A great barn-like room was given up to me, with heaps of potatoes and corn swept up into the corners of it. I had a stretcher-bed at one end, on which I got a very large allowance of good sleep. The cocks and hens roosted on the beams overhead and I heard my donkey and other beasts munching their food and snoring below” [p.84].
Often she describes plants with the precision one would expect of this woman who painted them so accurately. Here she describes her first view of Sparaxis pendula in South Africa: “Its almost invisible stalks stood four or five feet high, waving in the wind. These were weighed down by strings of lovely pink bells, with yellow calyx, and buds; they followed the winding marsh, and looked like a pink snake in the distance” [p. 217]. Close observation plus context, including a familiar image – very impressive.
Back home in England, North gives the reader an afternoon with Charles Darwin a few months before his death: “He sat on the grass under a shady tree, and talked deliciously on every subject to us all for hours together, or turned over and over again the collection of Australian paintings I brought down for him to see, showing in a few words how much more he knew about the subjects than anyone else, myself included, though I had seen them and he had not” [p. 257].