Design and Art Australia Online

botanical painter, grew up in the North family home, Hastings Lodge in Sussex, and on the family’s country estate, Rougham Hall, Norfolk. She studied flower painting in London with Miss von Fowinkel, a Dutch lady 'from whom I got the few ideas I possess of arrangement of colour and of grouping’, and took a few lessons from Valentine Bartholomew, 'flower painter in ordinary to Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Kent’. Most significantly, in 1865 she was taught to paint in oils by the expatriate Australian Robert Dowling , uncle of Florence Fuller . 'Oil painting is a vice like dram drinking, almost impossible to leave off once it gets possession of you’, she later wrote.

Having travelled widely with her widowed father for years (her mother died in 1855) sketching and painting as she went, North was left alone aged almost forty and without occupation when this 'one idol and friend of my life’ died in 1869. She took up solo travel on a grand scale, obsessively aiming to paint in oils all the plants of the world, using prepared paper that was fixed to canvas back in England (when she undoubtedly touched up her work).

North’s Australian travels were undertaken when she was fifty, still with all her legendary energy. Starting in Queensland, which she did not much like (she hit a drought), she travelled overland to Sydney vividly recording vast numbers of plants in colourful images and her adventures and impressions in pithy words. Tenterfield (NSW), for instance, she noted 'was what Australians call “a very pretty place”, meaning that there was not a tree within a mile of it, and that it had a little water within reach.’ At Bendemeer the locals were 'much amused’ with her sketch of sheoaks and companion birds. They thought 'I must “make a heap of money by them things”; they added that if they had a lot of money to spend “they would sooner buy any amount of them sort than gaudy chromos, they would”, which flattered my feelings.’

Normally, however, Miss North stayed at far grander places – with the Macarthurs at Camden Park ( see Emily Macarthur ) and the Macleays at Elizabeth Bay ( see Fanny Macleay ), for instance. The latter, she thought, was a pleasant change from distasteful Sydney town. Typically, when staying with Henry Parkes and his daughter Lily in the Blue Mountains, she found twenty-five different species of wildflowers close to the house in ten minutes and painted them in an afternoon. In Western Australia she stayed with John and Margaret Forrest and with Ellis Rowan , who painted flowers 'most exquisitely in a peculiar way of her own on gray paper’, she noted, and 'was like a charming [overdressed] small child’.

North’s opinionated three-volume autobiography based on her journals, Recollections of a Happy Life (1892) and Further Recollections of a Happy Life (1893), was edited by her sister, Catherine Symonds, and published posthumously. North died on 30 August 1890. Individually her paintings are competent but to see her life work in one place is an astonishing experience, worth the pilgrimage to Kew, and her book remains engrossing. The two have recently been published in combination in several well-illustrated selections.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

2011