GardenNews.biz - Jan 30,2011 - Stunning Spring Selling Exhibition at Kew Gardens
5 February - 1 June 2011
The Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
January 2011
From Eye to Hand
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is delighted to announce its first exhibition of original botanical artwork that will be for sale, at The Shirley Sherwood Gallery for Botanical Art. ‘From Eye to Hand’ will consist of paintings by artists whose work already features in the Kew Collection, and who were invited to submit material for this exhibition. A commission taken from sales will support the work of Kew, contribute to the ongoing development of The Shirley Sherwood Gallery for Botanical Art, and to the care of Kew’s art collection.
The Second strand of ‘From Eye to Hand’ will feature paintings that have been selected from the Kew Art Collection, which contains over 200,000 items. These are works by artists who flourished from the mid eighteenth century, through to those producing outstanding work today, and includes paintings by some of the undisputed masters of botanical art. The paintings, publications and archive material displayed here reveal a variety of style and subject. Some pieces have been produced for publication, while other examples were made to aid identification of and record plants being studied by botanists. The use of botanical illustration is still fundamental to scientific research, and Kew currently commissions a significant number of botanical illustrations a year. This will be the only section of the exhibition in which the artwork will not be for sale.
Professor Stephen Hopper, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, says, “This exhibition will allow visitors to see the splendour and richness of the work of some of the country’s finest botanical artists. We are excited to be hosting our first exhibition here at The Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art where such stunning work will be on sale. As well as being beautiful in their own right, botanical illustrations are also important scientific records through which plants are named and classified - visitors who invest in the artwork are also investing in the essential work that Kew carries out here and across the globe.”
For more information about The Shirley Sherwood Gallery please click here
The Botanical Brush
Alongside ‘From Eye to Hand’, there will be a display of the work of nine artists who have botanical paintings held in the archive of Hampton Court Palace Florilegium. The Society was founded in 2004 to record the paintings grown in the gardens of Hampton Court Palace, with special focus on the plants grown in the Queen Mary Exotics Collection, a National Heritage Collection unique to Hampton Court Palace that has been in existence since the seventeenth century.
The Society is limited to 25 members, all qualified botanical artists, who have gained internationally recognised awards and medals, and whose paintings and private commissions are held in collections worldwide.
The Secret Garden
The Leicestershire Society of Botanical Illustrators will also feature in the exhibition. Their paintings represent plants
