Artist Margaret Mee, Intrepid Amazon Explorer of Unknown Plants

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Botanical Braveheart

Besides her artwork, Englishwoman Mee left us scientific insights into the Amazon

By MARY LOUISE SCHUMACHER
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Posted: Oct. 25, 2005

Because she grew up in the pastoral green fields of southern England and drew inspiration from the children's book illustrations of her Aunt Nell, it is easy to see why Margaret Mee would eventually become an artist enchanted by nature.

Margaret Mee

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Margaret Mee's "Rodriguesiana" is one of her botanical paintings on display at Marquette’s Haggerty Museum of Art.

"Rodolfietta Aurantiaca" is an elegant still life.

Mee strove to be scientifically accurate with her paintings such as "Nymphaea."

"Heliconia Adeleana" shows the fragile blossoms.

"Gustavia-Augusta" is one of Margaret Mee’s paintings on display.

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What is a bit more of a surprise is that the shy girl, who would grow up to be a delicate, bird-like woman, became one of the most intrepid explorers of the Amazon, with a .32 revolver in her painting kit, recording some of the world's most bizarre and seductive plant life.

Like someone from a Henry James novel, the ill-at-ease English Mee was transformed by the coastal forests in Brazil, where she traveled to attend to her ailing sister, Catherine.

Not long after, at the age of 46, having settled on a precipitous slope in Sao Paulo with her husband, she began, in 1956, the first of 15 perilous expeditions into Amazonia.

Her subject was as much a contradiction as she was - the seemingly tenacious and mighty denizens of a forest that was in fact disappearing from Earth.

The quick but precise pencil and gouache sketches give us a hint at the artist's working hand. The more finished paintings that resulted from the field sketches are both precise and expressive, scientific record and portrait.

In her works, which are now on view at the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University, Mee captured the essence of remarkable plants, unique on Earth and many discovered by Mee herself.

The flowers of her "Nymphaea rudgeana," for example, which open all at once at dusk, emitting a lemon scent that attracts scarab beetles, are presented by Mee at various stages of opening, giving us a narrative rather than a snapshot.

She also shows us the "Selenicereus wittii," or "moonflower," in various stages of bloom, and the rarity of the event is evident.

Like a character moving to center stage, the moonflower tree is placed so far forward in one of the artworks that it can't be contained completely within the frame, as most of her plants are. And she shows us the surrounding forests, which literally and figuratively pale against the crimson fruits and lavish maroon leaves that envelop the tree's bark, each in its own contraposto stance.

Having seen the night-flowering moonflower cactus out of bloom on her third journey, in 1964, Mee spent 24 years hoping to witness the elusive event.

In the month of her 79th birthday and about six months before her death in a car accident in England, Mee kept vigil in a riverboat along the banks of the Rio Negro. She finally realized her dream and observed the splaying out of the spiny white petals of the ephemeral flowers by torchlight.

"In the early stages an extraordinarily sweet perfume wafted from the flower," she wrote in her journal, "and we were all transfixed by the beauty of the delicate and unexpectedly large bloom, fully open in an hour. . . . With the dawn the flower closed, and we watched fascinated and humbled by the experience."

Mee's works are in some cases the only records of plants, many of which may have become extinct. She paid the price for the records, having suffered from malaria and hepatitis, encountering combative Indians, breaking ribs and nearly drowning. She often traveled for weeks in a dugout canoe with a single Indian guide, dining at times on piranha.

In such a setting, it is astonishing that every petal, leaf and stamen, down to their colors and scale, were rendered with a scientific eye, placing Mee firmly within the tradition of botanical art. The tradition dates to the 15th century and was intended to illustrate and catalog plants, identifying them and making note of their medicinal value.

Accuracy is critical in botanical art, which reached higher levels of sophistication in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries with the rise of botany and an enthusiasm for gardening.

And yet the elegance and balance of Mee's compositions and the potency of their style place them on par with some of the greatest of still life paintings as well, from 16th-century Dutch flower paintings to Impressionist displays of form and color.

Political since her 20s, when she was outspoken in her opposition to fascism and involved herself in politics during the inter-war period, Mee was one of the first and most passionate defenders not only of the Amazon, its plants and wildlife, but also of the Amerindian peoples who lived there.

Near the end of her life, she compiled a collection of works that she considered a record of the vanishing Amazon. As relevant as ever, the works combine the worlds of art, science and conservation. Thirty of those watercolor drawings, as well as many field sketches of orchids, bromeliads and other plants, and diaries and Brazilian artifacts from her expeditions are part of the Haggerty show.