Marianne North

Marianne North (1830–1890) painted in Ceylon in 1877, towards the conclusion of a two-year journey about the world that had commenced in 1875. She was a botanical artist of a novel kind, who painted plants within their natural surroundings rather than as isolated specimens; this gave her work a context that formal botanical illustration had lacked. Her Ceylon paintings, executed in oil upon paper in the direct and vivid manner she preserved throughout her travels, record the island’s flora with an immediacy and an accuracy that have made them significant in scientific no less than in artistic terms. They are displayed today in the gallery she herself designed and endowed at Kew, where 832 of her paintings from throughout the world cover the walls from floor to ceiling.

When Marianne North came to the Cameron house at Kalutara, upon the south-western coast, Cameron, as North recorded in her memoirs, fell ‘into a fever of excitement at having a European subject’. For three days Cameron photographed her, arraying her in flowing cashmere and posing her against a screen of spiky coconut palms in a temperature of ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit. Cameron, as North recorded with characteristic dryness, ‘told me to look perfectly natural’. Four of the photographs survive. The most remarkable represents North at her easel upon the verandah of the Kalutara house, a painter recorded by a photographer, and two of the greatest women artists of Victorian Britain contained within a single frame, upon the western coast of an island at the utmost edge of empire.