Margaret Mee
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Margaret Ursula Mee (1909 Chesham, England - 1988, England), was a botanical artist who specialized in plants from the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. Her first tuition was at Dr Challoner's Grammar School. She studied art at St. Martin's School of Art, the Centre School of Art, and the Camberwell School of Art in London, England, where she met her future husband, Greville Mee, and received a national diploma in painting and design in 1950.
She moved to Brazil with Greville, her second husband, in 1952 to teach art in the British school of São Paulo, then became a botanical artist for São Paulo's Instituto de Botanica in 1958, exploring the rainforest and more specifically Amazonas state from 1964, painting the plants she saw as well as collecting some for later illustration. She created 400 folios of gouache illustrations, 40 sketchbooks, and 15 diaries.
Mee died in England in 1988, from a car crash. In her honor, the Margaret Mee Amazon Trust was founded to further education and research in Amazonian plant life and conservation, by providing scholarships for Brazilian botanical students and plant illustrators who wish to study in the United Kingdom or conduct field research in Brazil.
In 2004 the Antique Collectors Club in association with The Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, published Margaret Mee's Amazon - Diaries of an Artist Explorer (ISBN 1851494545). The cover depicts the Lecythidacea Gustavia pulchra and the book itself is a lavishly illustrated account of her expeditions into the Amazonian rainforests over a period of 32 years. Her excitement and passion for the Amazon is clearly evident in her lyrical and articulate notes. Several maps show the routes of her journeys and work sites quite precisely, but the focus of the book is on her detailed diaries kept between 1956 and 1988. The entertaining text is enlivened by drawings, paintings and photographs.
[edit] Bibliography
- Bromélias brasileiras
- The Flowering Amazon: Margaret Mee Paintings from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
- Flowers of the Amazon
- Flowers of the Brazilian Forests
- Margaret Mee's Amazon: Diaries of an Artist Explorer
- Margaret Mee In Search of Flowers of the Amazon Forests: Diaries of an English Artist Reveal the Beauty of the Vanishing Rainforest
- Margaret Mee: Return to the Amazon
- Margaret Mee's Amazon: Paintings of Plants from Brazilian Amazonia
