About Margaret Mee - Famous Botanical Artist

Margaret Mee was a petite English lady and botanical artist who produced hundreds of botanical paintings as a result of her expeditions around Brazil, along the River Amazon and in the Amazon rainforest. A number of her paintings were donated to the library at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. She is also well known for support of conservation. Besides her paintings, one of her lasting and hugely important contributions to conservation is that she alerted people to the exploitation and destruction of the Amazon rain forest.

Margaret Mee was born (in 1909) and brought up in Buckinghamshire - and was known to her family and friends as Peggy. The early part of her life with her first husband was spent as a political activist and she worked for a number of causes involving the underprivileged and the fight against fascism.

She trained as an artist by attending various of the London Art Schools and earned a National Diploma in Painting and Design. Following her marriage to her second husband Greville Mee she moved to live in Brazil where she became a botanical artist.

She arrived in Brazil in 1951 age 42 and initially taught art at a British school in São Paulo. She and her husband began to explore the country on various expeditions and she decided to start painting plant portraits. She began to establish her reputation as a botanical artist with her first exhibition of 25 paintings was in Brazil in 1958 and then another exhibition in London in 1960. Her work was subsequently acclaimed internationally by botanists and art critics alike.

Shortly after her first exhibition she was became a botanical illustrator at the Instituto de Botânica de São Paulo. Her first expedition to the Amazon was in 1956 and she continued to produce paintings from the rain forest over a period of 32 years

Subject matter

She was commissioned to illustrate the Flora Brasilica. This was very ambitious project to catalogue and illustrate the plants of Brasil. This involved working expeditions to various parts of Brazil.

In Brazil she specialised in painting orchids and bromeliads. It's notable that a number of the species she painted had not been recorded before. She also had a long held ambition to illustrate a Moonflower (a night-blooming cactus) - and was ultimately successful in her quest.

Margaret Mee's approach to painting

Mee's work reminds me of Marian North's work in as much as specimens are not isolated from their backgrounds. She sketched in pencils and then used watercolour and gouache for her 400+ paintings. Unlike other artists she did not isolate her specimens in a plain background but rather painted them in their context.

Where is her work now?

Much of her work recording the flora of Brazil quite rightly remains in the archives of the Instituto de Botânica São Paulo in Brazil. One source suggested that this work was now recorded in Margaret Mee 1909-88 but I'vbe been unable to track this down. The Kew website suggests that the publication of the complete works of Margaret Mee still requires funding.

Margaret Mee's Amazon - Diaries of an Artist Explorer (cover above right) was out of print for a long while but it's now possible to get hold of copies of a 2004 edition. This book contains her detailed diaries kept between 1956 and 1988 plus several maps whch show the routes of her journeys and work sites quite precisely.

The Margaret Mee Fellowship Programme
The Margaret Mee Fellowship Programme has been set up to honour her memory. Every year a student artist from Brazil travels to London to train as a botanical artist at Kew Gardens

Margaret Mee died as a result of a car crash in 1988.