R.I.P. Anne Ophelia Dowden, 99 ("Shakespeare's Flowers")
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(book covers & photos)
Another obit is in today's NY Times.
Lenona.
Anne Ophelia Todd Dowden, 99; botanical artist known for detailed
paintings of flowers and insects
By Mary Rourke, Times Staff Writer
January 12, 2007
Anne Ophelia Todd Dowden, a botanical artist who wrote and illustrated
a number of books and displayed her watercolors at museums and
botanical gardens around the country, has died. She was 99.
Dowden died Jan. 4 in her sleep at Frasier Meadows Retirement Community
in Boulder, Colo., according to Carolyn Crawford, a longtime friend.
A native of Denver, Dowden spent many years in New York City but
returned to her home state in 1990. She was known for painting flowers,
herbs and insects in precise anatomical detail, using only live
blossoms as models. She also kept a large collection of beetles and
bugs for her work, and once said she had spent six weeks painting the
hairs on a bee's leg for one of her works.
Several of her books won awards. "Look at a Flower" (1963) and "Wild
Green Things in the City, A Book of Weeds" (1972) received awards from
the American Library Assn. "The Blossom on the Bough, A Book of Trees"
(1975) was named an outstanding book for children by the National
Science Teachers Assn.
She also illustrated books written by others. "Shakespeare's Flowers"
by Jessica Kerr (1969) and "Roses" by Louis Untermeyer (1970) are among
her best-known collaborations.
House Beautiful, Life, Natural History and Smithsonian magazines
published her illustrations. Her work was exhibited at the Smithsonian,
the New York Public Library and the Denver Museum of Art, among other
places.
"Anne Ophelia has got to be the country's leading botanical artist,"
James White, curator of art at the Hunt Institute for Botanical
Documentation at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, which owns
about 300 of Dowden's watercolors and drawings, said in an interview
with The Times last year.
She decided to be an artist at age 5, but for many years she supported
herself by teaching. She moved to New York City in her 20s and taught
at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She later joined the faculty of
Manhattanville College, where she was the founding chairwoman of the
art department. She remained there until the early 1950s.
For 15 years, starting in the mid-1930s, she designed botanical-print
wallpaper and drapery fabrics for the American Design Group, which she
co-founded.
Drawings and watercolors remained a sidelight until Dowden was close to
age 50. Then, "I finally combined hobby and profession and began the
work I like best," she later recalled.
Many of her artworks appear in her nature books for young readers. To
research them, she collected weeds in railroad yards, pulled flowers
apart to study their insides, watched moths pollinate orchids and the
like. "That kind of on-the-spot research taught me the botany I never
studied in school," Dowden wrote in a 2003 autobiographical essay for
the journal "Children, Youth and Environments."
In an interview she described how she researched "State Flowers"
(1978). First, she wrote to state government offices. "I wanted to know
the exact species" of each flower, she said in a 2002 interview with
the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. She asked botanical gardens around the
country to send her live examples of the blossoms she needed, because
she never worked from slides or photographs.
"Anne Ophelia felt she had a more intimate acquaintance with the
plants, drawing from live specimens," said Crawford, a botanical
artist, in a 2006 interview with The Times.
"When certain things were in bloom you didn't see her," Lotte
Blaustein, another friend, told The Times last year. "Anne Ophelia knew
a lot of people, but she wasn't that social. Hers was a life of
friendship by correspondence."
She was born Anne Ophelia Todd on Sept. 17, 1907. As a child, "the
study of nature was my absorbing hobby," she wrote in her
autobiographical essay of 2003.
As a teenager she made medical drawings for her father, James Todd, a
pathologist.
She earned a bachelor's degree at Carnegie Institute of Technology in
Pittsburgh (now Carnegie-Mellon University) before she moved to New
York City.
She married Raymond Dowden, an art student whom she met at Carnegie, in
1934. In the early years of their marriage they were artists in
residence in a summer program sponsored by Louis Comfort Tiffany on his
Long Island estate. Tiffany spent weekends at the house and critiqued
student work when he was there.
Dowden especially recalled "very hard work painting in the fields and
woods every day, followed in late afternoons with swimming in the bay."
Raymond Dowden joined the faculty of the Cooper Union for the
Advancement of Science and Art in New York City in the early 1930s and
was head of the art department for more than 30 years.
He died in 1982. The couple had no children.
When Dowden moved to Colorado she continued to work on books.
Watercolors for "Poisons in Our Path, Plants That Harm And Heal" (1994)
were displayed at the Denver Botanic Gardens in 2002.
"If I'd been a painter only, I would have been an abstract painter,"
Dowden said in an interview about the exhibit. "But I chose to convey
information."
leno...@yahoo.com
SELF-ILLUSTRATED YOUNG ADULT BOOKS
The Little Hill: A Chronicle of Flora on a Half Acre at the Green Camp,
Ringwood, New Jersey, Cooper Union Art School, 1961.
(Under name Anne Ophelia Todd) Cooper Union Art School 8, Cooper Union
Art School, 1961.
Look at a Flower, Crowell, 1963.
The Secret Life of the Flowers, Odyssey, 1964.
(With Richard Thomson) Roses, Odyssey, 1965.
Wild Green Things in the City: A Book of Weeds, Crowell, 1972.
The Blossom on the Bough: A Book of Trees, Crowell, 1975.
State Flowers, Crowell, 1978.
This Noble Harvest: A Chronicle of Herbs, Collins & World, 1979.
>From Flower to Fruit, Crowell, 1984.
The Clover and the Bee: A Book of Pollination, Thomas Y Crowell, 1990.
Poisons in Our Path: Plants That Harm and Heal, HarperCollins, 1994.
ILLUSTRATOR
(Contributor) Wild Flowers of the United States, New York Botanical
Garden/McGraw, Volume I, 1966, Volume II, 1967, Volume III, 1969.
Jessica Kerr, Shakespeare's Flowers, Crowell, 1969.
Hal Borland, Plants of Christmas, Golden Press, 1969.
Louis Untermeyer, editor, Roses, Golden Press, 1970.
Untermeyer, Consider the Lilies: Plants of the Bible, Golden Press,
1970.
Borland, The Golden Circle: A Book of Months, Crowell, 1977.
Phyllis Busch, Wildflowers and the Stories behind Their Names,
Scribner, 1977.
Robert Crowell, The Lore and Legends of Flowers, Crowell, 1982.
John and Katherine Paterson, Consider the Lilies, Crowell, 1986.
Lenona.