Events at Kew and Wakehurst Place

The Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art is Now Open

Kew is delighted to announce that The Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art is now open to the public. It is the first gallery in the world to open year round dedicated solely to botanical art.

The gallery will showcase art from Kew’s unique historic collections as well as Dr Sherwood’s contemporary collection of botanical art. The two collections, which complement each other, will allow Kew to show to the public many of its largely unseen treasures and there will always be a changing selection of contemporary works on exhibition from the Shirley Sherwood Collection. The new gallery will become the world centre of botanical art.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew holds one of the world’s greatest collections of botanical art, totalling over 200,000 items. Until now much of this material has remained hidden in the Library at Kew, known only to a few, mainly due to a lack of adequate exhibition space with proper climatic control. The new Shirley Sherwood Gallery will now enable visitors to Kew to see many precious and unique works of art, by masters of botanical art such as Georg D. Ehret, the Bauer brothers and Pierre-Joseph Redouté, together with nineteenth century artists such as Walter Hood Fitch, who was one of the most prolific botanical artists ever. The controlled environment in the new gallery will also enable Kew to collaborate with other institutions that hold rich collections of botanical art such as the Chelsea Physic Garden, Natural History Museum and many international libraries.

Treasures of Botanical Art

The inaugural exhibition Treasures of Botanical Art: Icons from the Shirley Sherwood and Kew Collections (19 April - 19 October 2008) combines some of the highlights from the two collections. An historical sequence of antique books and watercolours from the Library are mixed and matched with contemporary works chosen by Dr Sherwood, showing old and new masters side by side.

Dr Sherwood started collecting botanical art in 1990, her first purchase being an orchid painted by a Kew artist Pandora Sellars. During her worldwide travels she discovered many botanical artists and she now has work from over two hundred artists from over thirty countries and the collection continues to grow. This is the eighteenth major exhibition of her collection around the world and the second at Kew.

The building, designed by award-winning architects Walters and Cohen, is intended to have minimum impact on the environment. Heating and air conditioning have been designed to use a fraction of the energy a conventional building would use; special glass and blinds will automatically react to light – reducing the running costs of the building and thus reducing Kew’s carbon footprint.