Page 168 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Marianne North: Botanical Paintings 1850-1890 + portrait of North by Julia Margaret Cameron
North is a shining example of a Victorian woman whose lifetime of work (over 1000 botanical paintings) illustrate her world-wide scientific exploration and discovery of new plant species, and her recording of these discoveries in detailed oil and water-colour paintings. Importantly she developed a style of botanical painting that deviated from the conventional approach (of focussing on a single species, a single plant in isolation) - North’s paintings, done in the wild ‘on location’ as it were, provided a complete contextual representation of the plant - thus North intimated in her paintings the importance of an holistic approach to the representation of Nature. Her lifetime’s work was eventually donated to the Royal Horticultural Gardens at Kew, and at her expense, a special gallery was created there to house them. She organised the meticulous hanging and curation of her pictures in this gallery, creating a multi-image immersive display of pictures that illustrated her lifelong scientific-artistic exploration of the World, with images from her travels and investigations in many continents. There is a good biography by Michelle Payne (Marianne North - An Intrepid Painter 2015) and a more recent BBC documentary by Emelia Fox - which you must see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM025LuEBoU
Her work is coincident with other great explorer/traveller-artists in the 19th century. Notable among these was Gottfried Lindauer (Maori portraits 1886) and George Catlin (Indian Gallery 1839) who both painted equally exotic portraits of Maori and North American Indian tribes. They are the anthropological equivalents to Marianne North. (The portrait of Marianne North -above- is by Julia Margaret Cameron, made in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka c1879)
See also: + Gottried Lindauer: Maori Portraits: 1886 +George Catlin: Indian Gallery: 1839 + Edward Sherriff Curtis: The North American Indian:1907 + Albert Kahn: Planetary Archive: 1908 + Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky: Colour photo-documentary of the Russian Empire:1909 +