ABSTRACT
During the nineteenth century there was some confusion over the labelling and categorizing of North's activities. These various labels highlighted the tensions between what connoted artistry and scientific acumen, between the worlds of amateur and professional, and between the separate spheres of male and female. In 1897, Edward Lear, a long-time family friend, referred to her as “a great draughtswoman and botanist.”. 1 W.B. Hemsley and J.D. Duthie, Kew botanists, referred to her rather as “an accomplished and faithful painter of plant and animal life” and as a “famous Flower artist” respectively, with Hemsley cautioning that she should not be considered a botanist. 2 The Dictionary of National Biography followed suit and dubbed her simply a “flower-painter.” Hemsley, despite his deprecation of North's painting as a “natural gift” rather than the result of careful study, went on to note that the North Gallery included 848 paintings which represented 146 of the 200 natural orders of flowering plants, belonging to at least 727 different genera. 900 species were named in the Gallery's catalogue as being represented in North's paintings. While the 848 paintings in the Gallery, painted between 1872 and 1885 represent an enormous amount of work for any one painter, Hemsley also noted that these paintings “by no means represent all the painting done during that period…”. 3 Clearly North's work was more than a hobby. Yet the social construction of ‘feminine’genres of art, the feminization of botanical art, and North's limited, gendered education in both art and science, all stood as hurdles to North's admission to the scientific community.
