BOTANICAL ILLUSTRATION: THE GOLD MEDAL WINNERS

by Charlotte Brooks ACC Art Books, £30 ISBN 978-1788840149

An attractively varied compendium of top prize-winning botanical paintings, together with an informative introductory essay. Reviewer Tim Richardson is a garden writer and critic.

Visitors to the RHS’s London shows will be familiar with the hotly contested botanical-art category, which from 2019 has been given its own dedicated show. Botanical illustration has experienced a ‘resurgence’ in the past 20 years, according to the author of this survey of work completed during that time. On the evidence of this publication, that is not an over-statement.

An informative introductory essay is at pains to emphasise that botanical illustration has been an aspect of the

RHS’s activities almost since the beginning, with the first drawings commissioned in 1806. The author observes that the rationale behind botanical illustration is exactly the same as it has always been: drawings and paintings are simply the best way of showing plants in detail. Even the highest-resolution photographs cannot display as much in ‘one hit’.

The luscious fruit paintings of William Hooker laid the

foundations for the RHS’s collection, augmented by work by Chinese artists in the 1820s, and in the 20th century by a significant bequest of exceptional paintings donated by Reginald Cory (creator of the garden at Dyffryn). It was a delightful surprise to discover that the plantsman EA Bowles was also an accomplished painter, healthily obsessed by snowdrops.

Of the successful artists included in the book, two demographic factors are notable. First, they are nearly all women. Second, artists from Japan are prominent, among them Mieko Ishikawa, whose exquisite painting of a weeping cherry branch is included along with Noriko Watanabe’s studies of the dying flowerheads of Hydrangea quercifolia. Elsewhere, the subject matter includes giant hogweed, the gnarled roots of rheum and a magnificent double-page reproduction of a cabbage plant.