KEW’S ART COLLECTIONSChristopher MillsThe Art and Illustration Collection at Kew is one of the three maincollections managed and developed by the Library, Art & ArchivesTeam. The principal art collection is made up of over 200 000 orig-inal works, mostly watercolours on paper and vellum, line drawings,pencil sketches and prints. There are also some oil paintings, butwith the exception of one large collection, these are mainly portraitsof various notable botanists and Kew characters. The core of thecollection is of plant portraits, drawings of plants and the parts of plants. The one exception is the Marianne North Collection, whichis mostly oils but unusually Miss North applied her oil paints to paperrather than canvas. I will return to this particular collection later as itis in many respects quite distinct from the main botanical art worksthat Kew holds, not least as most of it is permanently on display inits own gallery.In addition to the original works of art on paper, the collection issupported by thousands of printed items, many lovingly and beauti-fully hand coloured and dating from the early 1400s to the presentday. For example we recently took delivery of our copy of the limitededition

Highgrove Florilegium

. Similarly, hidden within the manuscriptcollections of our Archives are many notebooks and letters, whichcontain delightful, curious or outstanding sketches and illustrations.

Historyofthe library.

The art and book collections at Kew,although assembled for other reasons, now serve to give a goodrepresentation of the history of botanical art over the last 500 years.Whilst some items have been at Kew since the 1790s when Sir JosephBanksappointedFranzBauerasﬂowerpainteratKew,(inwhichposthecontinueduntilhisdeath),therewasnoformallibraryatKewuntil1852. Before that timeBanks andothers made theirown librariesandthe drawings they contained, available for use. The Library properbeganin1852whentheRev.WilliamBromﬁeld,awealthyclergymanfrom the Isle of Wight, bequeathed his herbarium and library of about 600 volumes. In 1854 George Bentham presented his libraryand in 1866 Sir William Hooker’s library and correspondence were

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purchased for £1000. This combination of purchase and donationis a signiﬁcant feature of the overall development of the Library’scollections which continues to the present day (Rix, 2008).Hooker’s library was a particularly ﬁne one with many rare andbeautifully illustrated items such as Ruiz’s

Florae Peruvianae et Chilensis

Fig. 1. Polyanthus, cowslips and primroses, by Maria Sybilla Merian,

. 1670.

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published in Madrid in 1794 and Besler’s

Hortus Eystettensis

printed inNuremberg,1613.Otherhighlyillustratedbookswithhandcolouringinclude such rarities as John Sibthorp’s

Flora Graeca

(10 volumes,1806–1840) illustrated by Ferdinand Bauer and Nicolas Jacquin’s

Selectarum stirpium Americanarum historia

(3 volumes, 1780–1781), one of no more than 25 sets produced. Although expansion of the collection today, both for contempo-rary and historical items, is mostly by purchase, donation remains animportantsourceofacquisition.Presentdayartistsrecognisethestatusand signiﬁcance of the collection and the possible beneﬁts of havingtheirworkseenalongsideothersinacentreofexcellence.Thefamiliesof individuals associatedwith Kew have also kindly fostered past rela-tionshipsintothefuturebypresentingtheirforebears’picturestoKew.

Botanical art.

We aim to enhance our collection of botanicalpaintings by purchase and commission, but like most institutions, westruggle to compete with the private collectors, both for the work of the most established contemporary artists and for historical items atauction. Consequently in recent years we have put effort into spottingthe best artists early in their careers and in arranging private sales forolderitemssowecanraisefundsonourtermsandtimescale.Recentlya scheme for sponsorship of artworks that deposits them in the collec-tion has proved popular with supporters and has greatlybenefited thecollection.Visitorsareoftensurprisedatthesizeofthecollectionitself,and are frequently not expecting the variety that they find, both inrange of style but also the size of individual paintings. Pictures in ourcollectionrangefromasketchafewmillimetreswidedrawnonascrapof paper through to items of several feet in width and length, wherethe only practical way to store them is rolled around a large tube. A common misconception about, or criticism of, botanical art andtherefore Kew’s collection is the claim that botanical art is all rather‘samey’ and has not changed in centuries. Just the few pictures thataccompany this article, I think, rather disprove this. While withinour collection there are indeed many examples of a single specimenfloating on a sea of white paper, it is not the whole story.Represented within the collection is some of the finest botanicalartwork that has ever been produced, technically perfect but alsostunning to look at. Work from the 18th and first half of the 19th

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