Anne Ophelia Todd Dowden, Artist, 99,

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Anne Ophelia Todd Dowden, 99, Artist, Dies

By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO

Anne Ophelia Todd Dowden, a renowned and popular botanical artist whose
subjects ranged from the flowers found in Shakespeare to the weeds
found in New York City [New York], died Thursday [January 11, 2007] in
Boulder, Colorado. She was 99.

Her death was announced by Martha Hutchinson, a cousin.

Ms. Dowden was recognized for the anatomical accuracy and beauty of her
paintings. She worked mainly in watercolor, producing elegantly
detailed images of flowers, insects, herbs and birds. She used only
living specimens for models and kept extensive collections of preserved
flowers and insects as reference material.

Her works reflect the simple pleasure of looking at nature.

Her career as a botanical illustrator and author resulted in more than
20 books, many of them for younger readers. Most were written and
illustrated by her, though she also illustrated books written by
others. Her subjects included poisonous plants, flower pollination and
state flowers as well as flowers mentioned in the Bible and in the
writings of Shakespeare.

Two of her books won awards from the American Library Association.
Among them was "Wild Green Things in the City: A Book of Weeds"
(1972), about native weeds that grow in New York City, her home for
more than 50 years. She spent three years scouring the city in search
of specimens to illustrate, investigating warehouse areas, parking
lots, docks, sites of torn-down buildings and the edges of railroad
yards.

Her work was also shown in museums and at botanical gardens, including
the Smithsonian, the New York Public Library and the Denver Art Museum.
The Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie-Mellon
University in Pittsburgh holds a major body of her original artwork and
most of her correspondence.

Anne Ophelia Todd Dowden was born in Denver [Colorado] on Septeember17,
1907. She grew up in Boulder, where she roamed the foothills of the
Rocky Mountains, collecting and drawing nature specimens. As a teenager
she made medical drawings for her father, head of pathology at the
University of Colorado Medical School.

She was awarded a degree in art in 1930 from Carnegie Institute of
Technology in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie-Mellon University), moving
shortly after to New York. In 1934 she married Raymond Baxter Dowden,
also an artist, whom she had met while studying at Carnegie. He was for
many years on the faculty of the Cooper Union School of Art and
Architecture. He died in 1982. They had no children.

As a young artist in New York, Ms. Dowden hoped to become a book
illustrator, but met with little success. She supported herself for
almost two decades by teaching at the Pratt Institute and then at
Manhattanville College, where she founded the art department. She also
designed floral printed wallpaper and drapery.

Ms. Dowden was in her late 40s when regular freelance illustration
commissions for Life, House Beautiful, Natural History and other
magazines enabled her to make the transition to full-time botanical
illustration. She was in her 50s when she began publishing books. Her
second, "Look at a Flower," from 1963, remained in print for 22
years. Ms. Dowden returned to Boulder in 1990. Paintings from her last
book, "Poisons in Our Path: Plants That Harm and Heal" (1994), were
shown at the Denver Botanic Gardens in 2002. The same year, the Hunt
Institute mounted a retrospective of her work to coincide with her 95th
birthday.

James White, curator of art and principal research scholar at the Hunt
Institute, in a telephone interview, described Ms. Dowden as "surely
among America's leading botanical artists of the 20th century, and
probably the most popular."

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/arts/design/16dowden.html?ref=obituaries

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