A BOTANIST WITH A COLLECTOR'S EYE | August 16th 2008

Memories of the flora in the mountains of Pakistan inspired Shirley Sherwood to collect contemporary botanical art. Such works seem to be enjoying a renaissance. Art.view talks with the botanist, hotelier and collector ...

From ECONOMIST.COM

Dr Shirley Sherwood is a botanist who became distinguished collector by chance. She was working at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and saw some paintings that stirred a childhood passion. In 1990 she bought a watercolour by Pandora Sellers, an English painter, of a pink orchid wreathed in exotic tropical leaves.

Eighteen years later her collection contains more than 700 works by 200 artists, and the best of them are on show at the world's first gallery devoted to botanical art. A new Portland-stone addition to Kew, it happens to be called the Shirley Sherwood Gallery.

The childhood memory she recalled was a visit to what today is Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province. With pony and guide, she combed the mountainsides for flowers to collect and press. She had the traditional collector's apprenticeship, amassing fossils, plants, stones, feathers and birds' nests, but when she finished her degree in botany at Oxford she moved into pharmaceutical research. Eventually she married James Sherwood, a successful businessman who owned the Orient Express chain of hotels, which she helped run.

When the collecting bug bit her again she decided to concentrate on the neglected field of botanical art--specifically contemporary work, mainly in watercolour. She saw no point competing with established historical collections in museums and libraries. Because few examples of botanical art came up at auction or were shown in commercial galleries, she had to seek out painters whose work she admired.

Artists in America, Australia, South Africa and South America soon made the acquaintance of this small, energetic woman who, while visiting her company's hotels, took time off to commission original work. Now she cannot stop, and as she shows a visitor around the "Treasures of Botanical Art" exhibition in the gallery that bears her name, she exhibits the obsession and exuberance of a dedicated collector.

Drawing on Kew's collection and hers, the exhibition shows how comfortably the old and the new sit beside each other. Botanical painting has its origins in medieval scientific treatises on herbs, and its decorative qualities reached high standards with the work of 18th-century German painters--notably Johann Christoph Dietzsch. Dr Sherwood confesses she "fell in love with" his dramatic illustration of a thistle and butterflies; she broke her contemporary-only rule to buy it.

Dr Sherwood pauses by a striking piece from Queensland by Bronwyn Van de Graaff of the trunk, wispy leaves and straight flower of a species of Australian grasstree (xanthorrhoea johnsonii). "It takes an awfully long time to do," she says. "It's demanding too, because you cannot afford to make mistakes."

Botanical art is not all pretty English roses and camellias. Dr Sherwood grows misty-eyed in front of a long ear of corn by Kate Nessler, from Missouri, and a beetroot painted by Susannah Blaxill, an Australian.

She reports that Pandora Sellers is flavour of the month, a position once held by Rory McEwan (one of her favourites) as well as by Carol Guest, Graham Rust and another Australian, Paul Jones. Even for them, however, botanical painting rarely pays well. But Dr Sherwood speaks with conviction about "the current renaissance" in botanical art. If that is the case, she occupies a position held in Florence by the Medicis, who were no mean collectors themselves.

"Treasures of Botanical Art" runs through October 19th at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery at Kew Gardens.

(The Art.view column appears every week on Economist.com.)