Marianne North Gallery

Born in Hastings in 1830, Marianne North devoted her life to travelling the world and painting plants.

Historical information

Although she had no formal training in illustration, and was rather unconventional in her methods, Marianne North had a natural artistic talent and was very prolific. She inherited her interest in travelling from her father, the MP Frederick North. Her political connections served her well, providing her with letters of introduction to ambassadors, viceroys, rajahs, governors and ministers all over the world.

Marianne undertook her first journey, to the United States, Canada and Jamaica, in 1871. This was followed by an eight-month stay in Brazil, during which time she completed more than 100 paintings. She tended to depict landscapes and natural habitats rather than individual plants. One picture, from Brazil, shows a colony of the black, red and yellow butterfly Heliconius erato phyllis roosting on a palm leaf. Another shows Mt Fujiyama, Japan, framed by the climbing shrub Wisteria sinensis.

Marianne travelled to Japan across the American continent in 1875, returning two years later via Sarawak, Java and Sri Lanka. Today her paintings from these places provide an important historical record. Some places are still recognisable from her paintings. For example, stands of the giant bamboo (Dendrocalamus giganteus) that she painted in 1877 at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, can still be seen thriving in the gardens today. 

After exhibiting her paintings in a London gallery in 1879, Marianne had the idea of showing them at Kew. She wrote to Sir Joseph Hooker, offering to build a gallery if he would agree to display her life’s work in it. The gallery was duly built, in the style of a European house in India. After a visit to Australia and New Zealand, Marianne spent a year arranging her paintings inside the building. It opened to the public in 1882.

Restoration and conservation

In 2008, Kew began restoring the Marianne North Gallery, with a £1.8million Heritage Lottery Fund grant and additional financial support from donors. The project involved making much needed structural repairs to the building, which re-opended to the public in October 2009. Each of Marianne’s 833 paintings, depicting more than 900 species of plants, are also being restored and conserved.

The conservation treatments that Kew conservationists use to do this range from removing the acidic backing board which Marianne stuck to every oil painting to make them rigid, to working with a microscope to gather, reposition and stick down tiny flakes of paint, which have come loose in the fluctuating humidity. Kew's collection of original and restored paintings will be rehung in the Marianne North Gallery at Kew Gardens at the end of 2010. You can help to support this project by adopting a painting by Marianne North.

Things to look out for

There are two touch-screen monitors in place at the centre of the Gallery, allowing visitors to zoom in on 50 of the paintings and read extracts from Marianne’s memoirs. In the artist’s studio, visitors can view a set of ‘then and now’ photos. These show how the landscapes in four paintings – in Jamaica, Sri Lanka, South Africa and Tasmania – have dramatically changed in the intervening years.

Kids’ mission

• Can you spot the following in Marianne’s paintings?

1) Monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana) - (Marianne called it a 'Puzzle Monkey Tree')

2) Coco de mer nuts (Lodoicea maldivica)

3) Cork trees (Quercus suber)  

• Can you also find each of them in the Gardens? Clue: you’ll need to look next to the Orangery, in the Palm House and in the Mediterranean Garden.
• Name at least one plant that now bears Marianne’s name.

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