Meticulous artistry
John McEwen
Stella Ross-Craig: Drawings of British Plants Kew Art Gallo, Kew Gardens, until 4 October
The factual probity of science has always been in bracing contrast to artistic hype, so when Stella Ross-Craig's botanical guide Drawings of British Plants is described as 'the single most useful illustrated account of British Flora ever produced', one sharpens up. Even more so when one learns that the last five directors of Kew have been weaned on her magnum opus and that the late Wilfrid Blunt, the ultimate authority on botanical art, wrote: 'In the making of scientific black-andwhite illustrations Miss Stella Ross-Craig stands unrivalled.' It is the cherry on the cake that this is Ross-Craig's first exhibition and she was born in 1906.
Ross-Craig began her great work in 1948 and completed it in 1973. Until it appeared botanical books were expensive specialist items. There was a need for a new guide, handy and cheap enough for the keen amateur as well as for schools and professionals. Previous illustrations had also been very small. Ross-Craig determined to do something larger — 7 x 111inches — with more dissections. The first publication cost six shillings and the full set when completed £26.20. Reissued as eight hardback volumes five years later in 1978, it had zoomed to £120. Today it is a collector's item.
For the exhibition Ross-Craig has selected 55 original examples from the total of 1,306, which constitutes the complete British list apart from grasses and sedges. The drawings were done at the rate of two a week, an amazing speed considering her other botanical commitments and the work involved. First she would read up on the plant then, using specimens she had collected — sometimes at her peril — or from Kew's herbarium collection, analyse its presentation and magnified diagnostic details for a sketch. It helped that she is also a taxonomist, a rare advantage for a botanical draughtsman. A detailed drawing in light pencil on white board, using a dissecting microscope and compass for the enlargements vital for identification, would be finished in black ink with a lithographic pen, square snippets of card glued on to provide a dimension key.
The illustrated plants were printed on good-quality paper to enable a purchaser to colour in the plates. It may be erring on the precious side to say that this would be a crime, nonetheless the beauty of a RossCraig is in the drawing. To appreciate this requires patience: to have images of flowers in black and white, especially in the context of Kew's summer abundance, might seem perverse; and detail is not the artistic fashion in these speedy times. It is symptomatic of contemporary art's fusion with advertising that we want it big and we want it now. Ross-Craig's meticulous artistry is patience rewarded, in the looking as much as the doing.
It is then one can marvel at how the complexity of her arrangements is never confused, for all the leaping from magnifications of one to 30, from flower to fruit in a single sheet. At how masterfully she differentiates between a line denoting volume or the surface of water to that describing a hair or filament. At her ability to convey the difference between two native brambles, a famous botanical teaser, or to record a duckweed flower, a phenomenon apparently rarely witnessed. And many subtle beauties of contrast and characterisation — beady-eyed berries topping a foam of elder flowers: the gliding horizontals of river water crowfoot: the minimal assurance of the medlar, her own particular favourite, and all the others, from the bold buckthorn beginning to a graceful finale of eelgrass. The line unwavering from first to last and hardly a touched revision to be seen.
The show was first exhibited last year at Edinburgh's Inverleith House Gallery, which under the direction of Paul Nesbitt has earned an international reputation for its dynamic contemporary art programme. Ross-Craig thus joined the company of such recent exhibitors as Carl Andre, Turner Prize winner Martin Creed and Cy Twombly. I wrote at the time that three things should ensue: Kew should take the show, Drawings of British Plants should be republished and Ross-Craig should appear in the Honours List. Thanks to Laura Giuffrida, who has made the show a focal point for Kew's summer festival Go Wild (23 May until 28 September), a celebration of the UK's bio-diversity, it is a case of one down, two to go.
The gallery is sometimes closed for special events. Visitors are advised to check on 020 8332 5655.
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