Marianne North: The intrepid Victorian who climbed mountains and paddled up rapids to create unforgettable natural art

door of the Marianne North Gallery at Kew Gardens in west London opens and three visitors make their way in, sun hats askew, looking a little battered in their checked shirts and shorts. Their jaws drop. Whatever they were expecting when they sought respite from this summer’s lone day of muggy heat, it wasn’t the barrage of colours that explodes from every wall. Here are the blowsy flowers of a giant Amazon water lily, rich white with pollen or spent and pink after the insects’ harvest; there is a bilimbi, its trunk festooned with small purple flowers. Asian orchids burst pink and alluring from a tangle of tropical leaves. The fiery blooms of the Indian coral tree clamour for attention from an inner door’s lintel and, in a corner, a butterfly hovers over the plump bulb of Boophone toxicaria, brown under a pink cloud of petals.

Every inch of the gallery is covered in vivid botanical paintings, hung in a scheme of geometrical perfection conceived by the artist, Marianne North, herself, more than a century ago. When she bequeathed her collection to Kew, North also paid for the building to house it, but stipulated that her paintings would have to remain together in the way she had envisaged, in part, says gallery manager Victoria Kew, ‘because she didn’t want any interfering botanist coming to change it round. We think she even painted some fillers to make it all fit together’.

This may sound far-fetched, but North was in every way an unconventional woman. At the ripe age of 39, when many Victorian spinsters would be embracing a life of quiet solitude, she decided to leave Britain behind for a whirlwind tour of 15 countries to paint the exotic plants she had long wished to see. Between 1871 and 1885, blue spectacles on her nose, brushes, easel and oil paints in hand, she hopped from the crimson maples of New Hampshire to the ‘feathery palms’ of Brazil and the ‘curious lava cracks’ of Tenerife, filled with large oaks and sweet bay trees. Everything about plants enthralled her: ‘My sister 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,’ Janet Catherine North Symonds wrote of Marianne after she had died.

Decades earlier, a visit to Kew Gardens had ignited in North a passion for both the tropics and botanical art. ‘It was in the Palm House that [botanist and Kew director William] Hooker gave her a plant that changed her life,’ explains Miss Kew. North was mesmerised by the hanging bunch of the Amherstia nobilis, calling it ‘one of the grandest flowers in existence’. It was, she recalled, ‘the first that had bloomed in England, and made me long more and more to see the tropics’.

After the death of her father, MP Frederick North, with whom she had travelled across Europe and the Middle East, she found herself at once prostrate with grief and independently wealthy, so resolved to throw herself into art and embark on new journeys — solo. (A brief experience with a companion shaped her views that a group of two was one too many.) Letters of introduction from English notables prevented her gaining a reputation for lunacy or loose morals, yet she still had to brave canoeing along jungle rapids, traversing tropical swamps and scaling forbidding peaks, all the time fighting rheumatism, gallstones, nervous breakdowns and vexing petticoats (although Margaret de Windt, the Rani of Borneo, frowned at North’s ‘undraped knees’).

The life and times of Marianne North

• October 24, 1830 Born in Hastings, East Sussex
• 1847–50 The North family embarks on a three-year tour of Europe
• 1855 Her mother, Janet, dies, and North and her father, Liberal MP Frederick North, take a flat in Victoria Street, London. Over the following years, North and her father frequently visit Kew Gardens, where director Sir William Hooker gives North a bunch of flowering Amherstia Nobilis, sparking her passion for tropical plants
• 1859–60 North, her sister, Janet Catherine, and her father travel across Europe
• 1865 North’s father loses his seat in Parliament, after which he and his daughter travel across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East
• 1867 The two journey across Europe. North switches from watercolours to oil paints
• 1869 North’s father dies, prompting North to travel to the tropics
• 1870 North and her maid visit Sicily, leading the artist to decide that she’d rather journey solo
• 1871 North visits the US, Canada and Jamaica

• 1872 She travels to Brazil
• 1875–77 She visits Tenerife, then the US, Japan, Singapore Borneo, Java and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), where she is photographed by fellow female pioneer Julia Margaret Cameron (pictured)
• 1877 North holds an exhibition of her paintings at Kensington Gallery
• 1878–79 She visits India and also agrees with Kew’s director Joseph Hooker that she will her bequeath the entire body of her artistic work to the Botanical Gardens in perpetuity, funding a gallery that will bear her name
• 1880 On Darwin’s advice, she travels to Australia, stopping in Borneo along the way
• 1881 She goes to New Zealand and the US, before coming back to England, where she plans the gallery’s hanging scheme. Pitcher plant Nepenthes northiana, which she discovered and painted in Borneo, is named in her honour
• June 7, 1882 The Marianne North Gallery opens at Kew
• 1882–83 The artist visits South Africa and the Seychelles. There, she has a nervous breakdown, during which she hears voices
• 1884 Queen Victoria writes to North, calling her gallery a gift to the nation. In November, the artist heads to Chile
• 1885 She adds more paintings to Kew
• 1886 She moves to Mount House in Alderley, Gloucestershire, and writes her autobiography (which is published posthumously in 1892)
• 1888 She is diagnosed with liver disease
• August 30, 1890 She dies at Alderley, aged 59

Actress and Kew Gardens ambassador Emilia Fox experienced first hand some of the hurdles North may have encountered when she followed in her footsteps to Borneo a few years ago: ‘Venturing into the jungle to try and find [giant pitcher plant] Nepenthes northiana in the ancient limestone mountains of Tagore was a physical challenge and I can’t imagine how difficult it would have been in full Victorian clothing, carrying all her equipment,’ notes Ms Fox, who is full of admiration for ‘a woman who had the determination not to let the spirit of the age define what she wanted to do’. The Bornean landscape, she recalls, ‘was almost primeval. The plants and animals are truly incredible, and I was able to appreciate why Borneo was such an irresistible prospect for Marianne, with its almost prehistoric feeling, ancient trees and mangroves’. Having seen in the wild some of the plants North had painted, including two, Crinum northianum and Nepenthes northiana, that were later named after her, Ms Fox realised ‘how exceptionally talented Marianne was to have captured not only the plants themselves, but also the environments and living habitats around them’.

Perhaps because she had no formal training, North subverted the canons of botanical illustration as much as she did societal norms. Until then, artists had produced accurate, but somewhat sterile watercolours of plants set against a drab backdrop. North portrayed the glory of flowers, trees and shrubs in their original home — a blaze of reds, blues and greens. Once, in Java, a fellow artist complained about the monotonous landscape being merely green. ‘I never saw the same in any two trees,’ a furious North wrote. ‘The lilacs and blues of the hills were delicious, the bamboos were just then quite yellow, and the rice fields of every tint… I longed to shake the stupid blind conceit out of the poor limp fellow!’

Often, glimpses of the world would sneak into North’s work: a delicate arch of wisteria framed distant views of Mount Fujiyama, the blinding-white dome of the Taj Mahal soared above tall trees and a shrub embroidered with bold red blooms brought out the blue of the sea in a Sydney harbour still empty of its Opera House. One canvas even shows, tucked among pendulous flowers, two shy (and admittedly rather dodgy) koalas. ‘She was definitely better at painting plants than animals,’ admits Miss Kew, pointing at kangaroos that look worryingly like miniature Tyrannosaurus rexes. ‘She wanted to include them, because she realised how important it was for the whole overview of the area.’

With photography still in its infancy, North’s art was as much about educating people about the world as it was about botany, revealing to the British back home flowers, vistas and even flavours of countries they would otherwise never see. Her painting of a mangosteen shows the fruit’s succulent ‘lumps of snow’ — which, she gushed, ‘melt in the mouth with a grape-like sweetness’ — emerging from the purple embrace of the rind under the distracted eye of a Singapore monkey. ‘In a Victorian world of black and white, Marianne North brought colour,’ enthuses Miss Kew.