Marianna
North

Marianna north (Eng. Marianne North; October 24, 1830, Hastings — August 30, 1890, Gloucestershire) —The English artist, botanist, traveler, who traveled alone in dozens of countries with oil paints and opened several species of unknown plants (some were named after her). Marianna did not know the lack of money - she was born in Victorian England in the family of a wealthy landowner. But she dismayed her state and her life from the point of view of the public: she flatly refused to get married, called marriage a terrible experiment that turned a woman into a servant, instead she swam to the most remote and inhospitable places on the planet, lived in tropical huts and wrote all her life unheard of Europe plants and landscapes.
When she first emerged from rainy, foggy England to America and Jamaica, North experienced a real shock and wrote all day. Then she traveled to Brazil, India, Africa, Tenerife, Sri Lanka, Japan, South Africa, by the way - and once brought her work to the director of Kew Botanic Gardens in London. Marianna offered to build a gallery on the territory of the Gardens with her own money - and place all her paintings there. The director agreed with all her proposals, only refused to serve tea and coffee to visitors - this is a serious scientific institution where scientists study rare plants from different continents, and not an entertaining place for onlooker tourists. Then North painted the space around the doors on her own –– and a tea-tree was painted above one of them, and a coffee tree above the other.
The works of Mariannna North, restored in 2009 and perfectly preserved due to the fact that she wrote in oils and not watercolors, like most botanists, can still be seen in the Kew Botanical Gardens Gallery in London.

Features of Marianna North: Unlike most botanists, who sketched in detail certain species of plants, North wrote them in the natural environment. Against the backdrop of mountains, seas, wild jungle. For her compatriots who came to the exhibition in London in 1879, these works were something of a tourist almanac about exotic places that they would never happen to visit. Saturated paints almost hallucinogenic shades, fancy flowers-predators, colorful birds with long tails. It so happened that North recorded the beauty of places that were soon mercilessly destroyed by civilization with its roads, offices and tourist centers.

Famous paintings by Marianne North: "The flower of the tropical jug Nepenthes Nortaniia", “Leaves and fruits of sterculia few-flowered”, "Fruits of wild tamarind and red chest breasts, Jamaica."