NEWS about Botanical Art and for Botanical Artists

Tradescant's Orchard - images of the exhibition at the Garden Museum

4/9/2017

This review of the exhibition - which includes images of the paintings and some of the artists - should have been written a very long time ago. The reason why this hasn't happened is explained at the end.

I've written two previous posts about Tradescant's Orchard Exhibition at the Garden Museum exhibition which are:

Tradescant's Orchard: A Celebration of Botanical Art (12 April 2017) - introducing the exhibition and listing the participating artists (with links to their websites)
Tradescant's Orchard - a Video of the exhibition (13 June 2017) posted after the opening and just prior to the Private View.

Below are photos of the exhibition - and of some of the artists with their paintings at the Private View - held on the evening of 13th June 2017 - organised as follows

some interior views of the Garden Museum - so you can see where the exhibition is located. It's the same space as that used by the Garden Museum for the exhibition of the Highgrove Florilegium back in 2009.
The Tradescant's Orchard volume - on loan from the Bodelian Museum
The Exhibition - including a slideshow of images of the paintings
The Artists - not all of them but a goodly number!
The exhibition organisers and sponsors; and finally
the explanation for the delay - which is maybe not what anybody was expecting. I know I wasn't!

Tradescant's Orchard exhibition - inside the newly revamped Garden Museum

Private View Speeches - Lucinda Grant and Lesley Ann Sandbach organisers of the exhibition explain how it all came together.

The Tradescant's Orchard

The exhibition includes a display of ‘The Tradescants’ Orchard’, a seventeenth-century volume of sixty-six watercolours (usually to be found in the Bodleian Museum in Oxford) depicting fruit varieties that John Tradescant and his son might have grown in their market garden at Lambeth.

The Tradescant's Orchard - a volume of watercolours lent by the Bodleian Museum

The 17th Century watercolours are from the collection of Elias Ashmole, whose collection founded the Ashmolean Museum, and are considered one of the Bodleian Library’s greatest treasures. The Orchard is a practical document that records the size, colour and texture of fruit with their ripening dates. This is the first time they have been lent to an exhibition outside Oxford, and the Museum are displaying them in a brand new exhibition space.

You can read more about the Tradescants (father and son) on:

The exhibition

The paintings are organised in groups of similar orchard fruit - and it was very interesting to see what was chosen. In part I guess because I was interested to see what fruits were available to John Tradescant back in the days when he was the royal gardener and was growing fruit trees in Lambeth.

I was actually a little bit surprised at some of the duplication. I guess I was thinking the project would start with a list of plants based on the book and then people would pick what they wanted to do - with only one person doing one type of plant. However that's my only negative as the exhibition reveals a high standard of botanical art - with some exceptional pieces.

I've set up the images of the paintings as a SLIDESHOW (below) because they're wider than usual. It will play automatically if you put your cursor over the image andclick the "Play" button top left. If you want to look at your own pace or retrace and look at the last one for longer, use the arrows which are middle of the image - on the right and left.

I've included some notes about each photo - but will try and come back and add in more detail as to who painted what! You can see a full list of the artists in my post dated 12 April - listed at the beginning.

Impressed? You should be - it's a splendid exhibition and has set a high standard for what we can expect to see in the future.

You have a month left to see it. The exhibition closes on 4th October 2017.

I'm expecting great things from this space as a future place where botanical art can be exhibited in London. Not that every exhibition will be about botanical art - but I'm looking forward to the next one......

The artists

This is an international exhibition - the artists live in the UK and around the world. A number of the artists had travelled long distances to get to the preview. Indeed some had arrived having just got off a plane!

Here are just some of the artists with their paintings. I hope I've got all the names right! I'm afraid the low light levels meant that the names of the plants and descriptions on the labels were very difficult to pick up. (Feel free to tell me what the plant is if you're featured in this post.)

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