THE GALLERY IN THE GARDEN
On a visit to Kew Gardens in London, a storm pushes Gillian Anstey towards a delightful discovery with South African ties
THE last thing I expected to be dazzled by at Kew Gardens in London was a painting, but that’s exactly what happened recently. Actually, it wasn’t one painting, but 832 of them.
They are the work of British Victorian artist Marianne North, who traipsed across five continents for 15 years, including a 10-month stint in South Africa, documenting flowers and scenery and sometimes animals in oil paintings on paper, which she later backed onto board.
Never heard of her? Well, I hadn’t either. If it hadn’t been for the rain pelting down so ferociously that not even a raincoat, rainhat and umbrella could save me from being drenched, I doubt I would have sought out the refuge of the building en route to the Japanese section of this 121ha Unesco World Heritage Site and a “must-see” on a London visit.
Now, however, I know North encountered and painted a “red-hot poker” in South Africa in 1883, not realising the species was new to science. A Kew botanist named it Kniphofia northiae, one of four plants from her paintings named after North.
Now, too, I have experienced the splendour of her gallery, which she proposed to Kew, paid for, chose its location and architect and spent a year sorting and hanging its paintings. These include scenes of Grahamstown, Ceres, Malmesbury and Table Mountain; proteas, which she said “quite startled me at first”; and a cycad in a Mr Hill’s garden in Verulam, KwaZulu-Natal.
This trip to South Africa was in August 1882, two months after the gallery opened, because, she wrote: “All the continents of the world had some sort of representation in my gallery except Africa, and I relished to begin painting there without loss of time.”
The gallery is astonishing because of the multitude of paintings, their intense colour and the way they are hung. Together with 246 different pieces of wood she collected on her travels, they cover the walls, creating a first impression that has been described as “almost overwhelming”; art historian Wilfred Blunt perhaps dismissively referred to it as being “like a gigantic botanical postage stamp album”.
Those paintings that one can see up close reveal that, individually, the work isn’t as remarkable as one thinks on first viewing; it is their combined impact that makes the experience unforgettable.
The gallery has two possible entrances and, although a visitor might miss the marble bust of North in the foyer, the spectre of this remarkable woman hangs over the gallery.
Her writings, in letters and a memoir, provide some hints of what drove her to this enterprising life of solitary travel: “I had long had the dream of going to some tropical country to paint its peculiar vegetation on the spot in natural abundant luxuriance,” she wrote before setting off to the US.
Her sister, Catherine Symonds, wrote that North “was no botanist in the technical sense of the term: her feeling for plants in their beautiful living personality was more like that which we all have for human friends. She could never bear to see flowers uselessly gathered, their harmless lives destroyed.”
The visitors’ book reveals enraptured responses. Alice Couvrey of Los Angeles wrote: “I’m in love with this small gallery.”
But few people’s enthusiasm
matches that of Eleanor Hasler, supervising conservator for the gallery’s two-year restoration, which started in 2008 and which has been documented in extraordinary detail.
“As a conservator you rarely get to meet someone outside of this room,” she said from her working space at Kew. “You sit on a bench and clean paintings.” But with the North project, she and her team met the people who sponsored the paintings, who chose a painting because they had visited that spot, or lived near that temple, and they experienced first-hand how the paintings affected people.
“We feel we’re really getting to know her,” Hasler remarked in a magazine article during the restoration. “We’re learning how she worked … Sometimes we find a bit of leaf or twig stuck in the paint, so she was clearly working in the field ….
“On the reverse of one jungle painting is a description of a sloth — how it moved, what it ate, how long she watched it. When you look at the picture you’d hardly even notice the sloth, but that’s clearly the bit she enjoyed most, painting the living creatures hiding in the trees.”