Margaret Mee's Amazon
Diaries of an Artist Explorer

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The director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew from 1988 to 1999, Professor Sir Ghilliean T Prance, said of Margaret Mee, "Many people have travelled Amazonian waters, many people have painted Amazonian plants, but Margaret Mee outranks those other travellers and artists simply because she, with her watercolours, went, saw and conquered the region... No wonder, that for us all her work bears authenticity as well as beauty."

No description of Margaret Mee's devotion to painting the plants and animals of the Amazon region could better encapsulate what she achieved.

Born in 1909 in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, as a schoolgirl, she was fascinated by travellers' tales. When she left school she studied art at Watford School of Art then taught the subject. After World War II, she worked as a draughtswoman but then attended first St Martin's School of Art and later Camberwell School of Art where she met her future husband, Greville Mee.

Her passion for South America began in 1952 with a visit to her sister who lived in São Paulo, Brazil. She and Greville fell in love with the country and they decided to live there. This was when her vocation as a botanical artist showed itself. Surrounded by unfamiliar scenery and plants, she began to draw and paint them. At the age of 47, in 1956 she went on her first expedition up the Amazon where her great love for the plants, wildlife and countryside was born.

She made several trips to the Amazon over the following 32 years, some of them lasting for four months. During these years, not only did she continue to paint and draw what she saw, she kept diaries of her travels too and it is these that provide the text for this beautiful book, lavishly illustrated with Margaret Mee's own paintings and also photographs taken on her expeditions.

In 1988, at the age of 79 and after completing another trip on the Amazon, Margaret Mee came to England to lecture to the Royal Geographic Society and to attend the opening of an exhibition of her paintings at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. During this visit, she was killed in a car crash. Ironic after all the dangers she had faced and survived in her Amazonian journeys.

Her legacy, though, is a wonderful collection of drawings and paintings of Amazonian flora and fauna. Not only are they beautiful, they are botanically accurate too.

Whether you are an art lover or a gardener, this beautiful book is sure to delight with its lovely pictures and the stories told by Margeret Mee in her diaries of her trips on the mighty Amazon.

Quick Facts

Title: Margaret Mee's Amazon - Diaries of an Artist Explorer

Editors: Margaret Mee

Publisher: Antique Collectors Club in association with The Royal Botanic Gardens, Key

ISBN: 1851494545

Binding: Hardback

Publication Date: October 2004

Price: £29.50

All information relates to the UK edition.

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Copyright © 2004 by Carol Fisher All Rights Reserved