Margaret Mee was both a botanical artist and a conservationist
who specialised in painting the flora of the Amazon Forest.
​She also made a significant contribution to the worlds of science and conservation. 
This page is an introduction to Margaret Mee (1909 - 1988) and will be of interest to botanical artists and all those who enjoy botanical art. It provides links to online sites providing details about her life and work and exhibitions and books where you can see her paintings.

The banner image above is from the exhibition "Brazil: a powerhouse of plants: Margaret Mee, pioneering artist and her legacy" at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery (20 February 2016 to 29 August 2016)

Margaret Mee - her life and work
​

Margaret Mee was a petite English lady and botanical artist who produced hundreds of botanical paintings as a result of her exploration of the flora of Brazil, along the River Amazon and in the Amazon rainforest. She follows in the traditions of the great lady botanical artist explorers!

In 1952, age 42 she left England to go and live in the Amazon. Age 47 she started to explore the Amazon where she studied and painted the plants and flowers of the Amazon rainforest for the next 30 years. She also found and recorded new plants which are now named after her.
Picture
Lecythidacea Gustavia pulchra on the cover of 'Margaret Mee's Amazon

Biography & Timeline (1909 - 1988)

Childhood: Margaret Ursula Mee was born on 22 May 1909 in Whitehill, Chesham - in the Chiltern Hills area of Buckinghamshire. She grew up there and was known to her family and friends as Peggy.

Her aunt, Ellen Mary Churchman was an illustrator of children's books and encourage the young Peggy to develop her artistic talents as an artist.

Education & Training: She attended:
  • Dr Challoner's Grammar School, Amersham
  • The School of Art, Science and Commerce,Watford. 
She then taught for a short while in Liverpool.

After WW2, she she enrolled as an evening student at St Martin's School of Art, Westminster. Subsequently in 1947 she attended at the Camberwell School of Art (1947-49) where she was taught by Victor Passmore.  She earned a National Diploma in Painting and Design.
​
Early Life and First Marriage: 
Her early life was very much involved with political causes relating to fighting for the rights of the underprivileged, supporting the Spanish Civil War and the fight against Fascism,
  • In February 1933 she witnessed the Reichstag fire in Berlin
  • She married Reginald Bruce Bartlett in January 1936 (age 27).  She and her husband were committed trade union activists with the Union of Sign, Glass and Ticket Writers. They divorced in 1943 after a long separation.
  • In 1937 she addressed the TUC and proposed the raising of the school leaving age. 
  • She had to flee France fifteen days after the outbreak of the Second World war
  • During the war she worked as a a machinist, then as a draughtswoman in the De Havilland aircraft factory at Hatfield​
Second Husband and A Life in Brazil: 

She met her second husband Greville Mee at St. Martin's School of Art in London. She changed her name by deed poll to Mee in 1952. They married in 1980.

Age 42, she moved with Greville Mee to Brazil in November 1951. Initially she taught art at St Paul's, the British School in Sao Paulo.

The two of them began to explore the country on various expeditions and she decided to start painting plant portraits - and became a botanical artist.  (see below for further details). 

​She also found and recorded new plants which are now named after her. (see below)

Her other claim to fame is that she was one of the first people interested in environmental issues who highlighted the impact of large-scale mining and deforestation on the Amazon Basin. She won the acclaim and support of many other environmentalists.

Honours

1975: honorary citizenship of Rio,
1976: MBE for services to Brazilian botany 
1979: the Brazilian order of Cruzeiro do Sul (Order of the Southern Cross)
1986: Fellowship of the Linnean Society

Return to England

Margaret and Greville returned to England in November 1988 for a major exhibition of her paintings at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew coupled with the launch of a book Margaret Mee in Search of Flowers of the Amazon Forest (1988) based on Margaret's diaries, 

Very sadly, Margaret Mee died as a result of a car crash in Leicester on 30th November 1988. A memorial service was held at Kew on 16 January 1989. Those attending included representatives of the Duke of Edinburgh, the Brazilian government, and the world of botany.

Legacy:
Her legacy includes 
  • 400 folios of gouache illustrations, 40 sketchbooks and 15 diaries - many now archived at Kew Gardens
  • an awareness of the importance of conservation of habitat in the Amazon rainforest.
  • she inspired a number of Brazilian artists - notably the Demonte family, Marlena Baretto, Patricia Villela and Alvaro Nunes
  • Margaret Mee Amazon Trust established (closed 1996) followed by a Fellowship Programme which allows Brazilian artists to train at Kew Gardens
  • 1994 (post mortem): 3,000 dancers paraded to a Margaret Mee theme at the Rio Carnival!
Plus a number of plants are names after her, including:
REFERENCE:

Margaret Mee and the Amazon Flora
​

For 30 years, Mrs. Mee devoted her life to traveling up the Amazon River and its various tributaries. She would head up river into a small boat by herself, with only a local pilot for companionship, occasionally with a friend or two. Mrs. Mee was not simply a traveler and explorer of new places; she was a painter who tried to create a unique record of the rare species of flowers of the Amazon Basin before they disappear under the onslaught of man. Her work has been compared to some of the masters at painting from nature.
an interview with the artist that was broadcast on the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour in November 1988
Age 47 she started to explore the Amazon where she studied and painted the plants and flowers of the Amazon rainforest for the next 30 years.

Between 1956 and 1988, she made 15 expeditions to the Amazon. Her intention was to record rare Brazilian plants. She specialised in painting orchids and bromeliads.
It's notable that a number of the species she painted had not been recorded before. ​Nine plants recorded in paint by Mee were previously unknown to science - and they are now named after her.

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.

Mee learned to live with the forest and its plants, animals and people. She learned a lot from the Indians about the trees and plants which she then painted.

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 in the 1970-70s due to the development of the Trans-Amazon Highway. 

Her expeditions to the Amazon
​

According to her diaries, the 15 expeditions occurred as follows:
  1. 1955 - Rio Gurupi
  2. 1962 - Mato Grosso - the 'Denser Forest'
  3. 1964/5 - Rio Uaupes, the'Far North'
  4. 1967 - Pico Da Neblina - the 'Mountains of Mist'
  5. 1967 - Rio Marauria - to the'Waika lndians'
  6. 1970 - Rio Demini-'Upper Amazon, Twln Rivers of Sorrow'
  7. 1971 - Rio Maues - 'Land of the Guarana'
  8. 1972 - Rio Mamori and Rio Marau - Through the cradle of the Red Desert'
  9. 1974 - Manaus
  10. 1975 - Manaus
  11. 1977 - 'Looking for the Lost Blue Quela and extinct Rio Cauhy'
  12. 1982- Arquipelago das Anavihanas - the 'Cactus of the flooded forest'
  13. 1984 - Rio Trometas - 'A Storm'
  14. 1984 - Rio Trometas - 'A Storm'
  15. 15. 1988. - The Moonflower on the River Negro
REFERENCE:
In Search of Flowers of the Amazon Forests
by Margaret Mee | Edited by Tony Morrison
This is the original publication about her life and work. This was published in 1988 just a few days before she died. ​

It includes a foreword by the Duke of Edinburgh.

It's regarded as the best published account of her life both in the UK and the Amazon.

If you had to choose between this one and the 2004 abbreviated version, this is the one to buy - albeit it will probably cost you a lot more for one "as new" as opposed to a used book. The latter can be had for much reasonable sum.

Hardcover: 
​Publisher: Nonesuch Expeditions;
FIRST EDITION (1988)​
Includes 134 colored paintings and sketches of over 100 species of Amazon plants. 
​
Margaret Mee's Amazon - Diaries of an Artist Explorer
This book - published in 2004 - is an abbreviated version of the book (see above) published in 1988 which has been out of print for some time (see above) . 
It contains
  • Margaret Mee's detailed diaries kept between 1956 and 1988
  • plus several maps whch show the routes of her journeys and work sites quite precisely.

​Hardcover: 320 pages (Dimensions: 24.7 x 3.1 x 30.6 cm)
Publisher: ACC Art Books;
Ist Edition published: 1 Jan. 2004

​Rated an average of 5 stars by 8 customer reviews (USA)
The video below was made in Brazil - with a commentary from Alvaro Nunes - for the Senate TV during a commemorative exhibition in the National Museum in Brasília.
Mee had a long held ambition to illustrate a Moonflower (a night-blooming cactus) - and was ultimately successful in her quest.
In the early stages an extraordinary sweet perfume wafted from the flower, and we were all transfixed by the beauty of the delicate and unexpectedly large bloom ... Our vigil was long and I conclude that our intrusion had deterred the pollinator, upsetting the delicate balance between the plant and the animal which has taken tens of millions of years to evolve ... With the dawn the flower closed and we watched fascinated and humbled by the experience. 
Margaret Mee
REFERENCE:
Flowers of the Amazon Forests - the Botanical Art of Margaret Mee
This is the latest version of the original book.

This book illustrates more than sixty of Mee's major works with additional sketches painted whilst in the forest.

The text is taken directly from the diaries she kept whilst travelling giving a wonderful insight into the Amazon.

​Hardcover: 167 pages
200 colour illustrations
(Dimensions: 24.8 x 2.1 x 31.2 cm)
Publisher: Natural Wonders Press (1 Aug. 2006)

Margaret Mee's Paintings
​

"Unlike Amazon botanical artists before her, Margaret worked entirely from living plants. Her fifteen expeditions into the interior, mostly to Amazonia, involved travelling and living under the most primitive conditions. She would draw at night by torchlight to capture rare nocturnal flowers, and this immediacy gave her paintings an accuracy, depth, and colour unrivalled by her predecessors. Her travels coincided with the beginning of the commercial exploitation of the forest, and she expressed her fury at the damage caused to the land and its peoples" ODNB
Her first expedition to the Amazon was in 1956.  She continued to travel throughout the wildest parts of Amazonia for the next 30+ years and produced paintings of the flora she found.

Shortly after her first exhibition she became a botanical illustrator at the Instituto de Botanica de Sao Paulo. ​Much of her work recording the flora of Brazil on behalf of the Institute remain remains in the archives of this Institute.

Prior to her death she developed a collection of her excellent examples of her works which she called "The Amazon Collection".  Initially, the paintings were exhibited at the Missouri Botanical Garden who then also stored them for a period. Eventually they were purchased by the Margaret Mee Amazon Trust and archived at Kew Gardens.
She preferred to sell her works privately. 

You can see reproductions of her work on the following sites
​You can also see reproduction prints at 

Her approach to painting

Mee had 'proper' art training at art school. She adopted a number of approaches to painting her botanical specimens
  • She always worked from observation of plants.
  • She initially sketched the plants in the forest in pencil.
  • She worked on the large illustrations of the entire plant in her studio in Rio de Janeiro.  These were often painted from the living plants that were sent back from her explorations
  • She painted in gouache on a paper called Fabriano Raffaello which was reputedly an excellent surface for gouache. She also used Schoellershammer​ paper.
  • Initially she adopted the classical approach to botanical illustration of painting the plant in isolation
  • As she became more and more concerned about the impact of deforestation on the Amazon habitat and flora, she started to emphasise the need for conservation of habitat. She did this by including the natural habitat in the background of the paintings. She hoped this would demonstrating the link and inter-dependency of plant and environment.
Picture
Margaret Mee's Paintbox at Kew Gardens (Old and New South American Botanical Art exhibition); 8 x 10", pencil in Moleskine; © Katherine Tyrrell
REFERENCE:
The Flowering Amazon Margaret Mee Paintings from the Royal Botanic Gardens,Kew 
​
by Ruth L. A. Stiff (Author), Margaret Mee (Illustrator)

This is the book of paintings by Margaret Mee in the Kew Collection which was published to accompany the travelling exhibition of her work that visited the USA in 2004 and 2005.  It includes
  • Twenty-six full colour reproductions
  • an introduction by Ruth Stiff,
  • brief history of Kew by Ray Desmond, and
  • essays by Simon Mayo, Brinsley Burbidge and Shirley Sherwood.
Paperback: 80 pages (Dimensions: 1.3 x 22.2 x 28.6 cm)
Publisher: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (1 May 2004)

Exhibitions of Paintings by Margaret Mee
​

Picture
Paintings by Margaret Mee included in the "Brazil - a Powerhouse of Plants" exhibition at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery at Kew in 2016
Her work was acclaimed internationally by botanists and art critics alike.
"...they are splendid, magnificently composed, superbly reproduced... can stand without shame in the high company of such eighteenth-century masters as Georg Dionysius Ehret and Redoute"
Wilfrid Blunt
Below Shirley Sherwood talks about one of the paintings by Margaret Mee in her collection.

20th century

Exhibition in UK and USA

​In 1960, she exhibited her paintings at the Royal Horticultural Society Botanical Art Show in London where she received the Grenfell medal. After this she was able to work as a freelance artist.

In 1964 she exhibited her paintings in Washington.

Flowers of the Brazilian Forests
Venue: The Tryon Gallery, London
Date: January 1968
Exhibition and launch of the first major publication of paintings of Amazon plants in a book called Flowers of the Brazilian Forest, Collected and Painted by Margaret Mee (1968). This was a folio edition of thirty-one paintings.
  • The Duke of Edinburgh (another well known conservationist) agreed to be a patron of the venture. 
  • Scientific text associated with each plate was contributed by noted plant taxonomists
  • Notes from her diaries about each plant were also provided by Mee

Flowers of the Amazon: Watercolours by Margaret Mee. 
58 paintings - painted for her second books Flores des Amazonas - Flowers of the Amazon.
  • Hunt Institute of Botanical Documentation (20 April – 13 June 1987) - a traveling exhibition in the USA
  • Exhibited at Kew in 1988 (shortly before her death)
Exhibitions in Brazil

In 1958, she had her first exhibition of 25 botanical paintings - in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.  This exhibition began to establish her reputation as a botanical artist

In 1964 she exhibited her paintings in São Paulo ​

21st century (posthumous)
​

Exhibition in UK and USA: 2000-2010

​The Flowering Amazon: Margaret Mee Paintings from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 
Dates: 2004-2006 - a two year tour around the USA to:
  • New York Botanical Garden (Spring 2004)
  • Hunt Institute of Botanical Documentation - The Flowering Amazon: Margaret Mee Paintings from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
 (12 May 2005 to 31 July 2005) - a travelling exhibition of thirty watercolor drawings and field sketches. 
  • Patrick & Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, 
  • Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; 
  • Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina; 
  • Chicago Botanic Garden, Glencoe, Illinois; and 
  • Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona.  

Hunt Institute of Botanical Documentation
Exhibitions in Brazil (2011)

Margaret Mee: 100 Anos de Vida e Obra | Margaret Mee 100 Years of Life and Work 
Venue: Brazil: National Museum of the Republic 2, Esplanada dos Ministérios, Brasilia
It also toured to other cities in Brazil. ​
Dates: (May 6 to June 5, 2011 )
The exhibition commemorated the 100th anniversary of her birth. The exhibition was curated by Sylvia de Bottom Brautigan. It included 
  • 52 watercolour paintings of the Bromélias species (collection belonging to the Botanical Institute of São Paulo),
  • three works from a private collection
  • five paintings belonging to the Brazilian Academy of Science that illustrate the caatinga regions. 
  • displays of various objects (maps, compasses used in expeditions, paints, brushes and pencils) used by Margaret Mee when she lived with the indigenous tribes of the Amazon basin 
  • a video with an interview granted by the artist to an American TV show, a few days before her death in a car accident.

Exhibition at Kew in 2016
​

Picture
View of the Margaret Mee section of "Brazil - a Powerhouse of Plants: at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art in 2016
​Brazil: a powerhouse of plants – Margaret Mee, pioneering artist and her legacy
Venue: Shirley Sherwood gallery of Botanical Art, Kew Gardens
Dates: 20 February 2016 to 29 August 2016, 10am to 5pm

This exhibition explored the diversity of Brazil’s magnificent flora. It contained paintings from 
  • both the Shirley Sherwood Collection and the Kew Collections.
  • by the intrepid British artist and explorer Margaret Mee 
  • by contemporary Brazilian artists.
Mee made 15 trips into the Amazon, recording the extraordinary plant life in her diaries and paintings. The exhibition included a map which demonstrates the extent of her travels through the depths of the Brazilian rainforest. The exhibition included other artifacts from her expeditions including paintbrushes, paint pots and sketchbooks

The exhibition also included :
  • paintings by Alvaro Nunes - who also spent a huge amount of time travelling and working in remote areas of Brazil.
  • paintings by Patricia Villela and the Demonte family, who travelled extensively in Brazil,
  • paintings by artists who have benefited from the Margaret Mee Fellowship Programme (see below)
  • copperplate engravings depicting the local flora of Rio de Janeiro, taken from Joseph Banks’ Florilegium – a collection of plates showing the novel plants collected on Captain Cook’s first HMS Endeavour voyage in 1768.​
Picture
'Clusia grandiflora' by Margaret Mee
Picture
My sketch of Margaret Mee's Paintbox - exhibited Kew Gardens in 2010

The Margaret Mee Trust and Fellowship Programme
​

The Margaret Mee Amazon Trust was founded in 1988 following discussions with Margaret and Greville Mee concerning the future of the magnificent Amazon Collection: 60 paintings of Amazonian plants by Margaret Mee. The MMAT was an educational charity dedicated to raising awareness of the importance of the conservation of Brazil's forests, especially in Amazonia. The Trust was based in the UK and its immediate objectives were to raise funds for i) the purchase of the Amazon Collection for deposit at Kew, and ii) the creation of a scholarship scheme, aimed at supporting forest conservation
​Kew Gardens - The Margaret Mee Fellowship Programme
The Margaret Mee Amazon Trust was being set up by Margaret Mee prior to her death. The intention was that it should purchase the Amazon Collection and assist Brazilian botanical students to study in the UK. The Trust was eventually founded in 1988.

The Margaret Mee Amazon Trust was officially launched, in the presence of the artist and her husband Greville, on the 9th November 1988 at the preview of the exhibition of the Amazon Collection at Kew - just three weeks before age died as a result of a car crash.

The Margaret Mee Fellowship Programme was set up to honour her memory. Research fellowships were discontinued in 2005 and the programme is now limited to a five-month artistic Fellowship (approx. 6500) which is awarded annually. Every year a student artist from Brazil travelled to London to train as a botanical artist at Kew Gardens. ​

Read more about the artists who benefited from the Scheme in Botanical Artists in South America

REFERENCE:
More Past Masters of Botanical Art & Illustration
​