Ethel May Dixie (9 May 1876 in

Sea Point Sea Point (Afrikaans: ''Seepunt'') is one of Cape Town's most affluent and densely populated suburbs, situated between Signal Hill and the Atlantic Ocean, a few kilometres to the west of Cape Town's Central Business District (CBD). Moving from ...

Cape Town Cape Town ( af, Kaapstad; , xh, iKapa) is one of South Africa's three capital cities, serving as the seat of the Parliament of South Africa. It is the legislative capital of the country, the oldest city in the country, and the second largest ...

– 11 October 1973 in

Rondebosch Rondebosch is one of the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town, South Africa. It is primarily a residential suburb, with shopping and business districts as well as the main campus of the University of Cape Town. History Four years after the first Dutch s ...

, Cape Town) was a South African botanical artist. Dixie was largely self-taught unlike her older sister who enjoyed the benefits of tuition by Thomas Bowler. Nonetheless, she was the principal artist for

Rudolf Marloth Hermann Wilhelm Rudolf Marloth (28 December 1855 Lübben, Germany – 15 May 1931 Caledon, Cape Province) was a German-born South African botanist, pharmacist and analytical chemist, best known for his ''Flora of South Africa'' which appeared i ...

's ''The Flora of South Africa''. Many of the original plates for this work, were destroyed by a fire at the publisher. She was also a lecturer at the Cape Town School of Art. Her work can be found at the

Brenthurst Library The Brenthurst Library is a private repository of Africana (artifacts), Africana in Johannesburg built by Harry Oppenheimer in 1984 as he started to disengage from the family's mining interests. It houses a collection of some 20,000 volumes, inc ...

Johannesburg Johannesburg ( , , ; Zulu and xh, eGoli ), colloquially known as Jozi, Joburg, or "The City of Gold", is the largest city in South Africa, classified as a megacity, and is one of the 100 largest urban areas in the world. According to Demo ...

, the Carnegie Library archives at the

University of Stellenbosch Stellenbosch University ( af, Universiteit Stellenbosch) is a public research university situated in Stellenbosch, a town in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Stellenbosch is the oldest university in South Africa and the oldest extant ...

, MuseumAfrica in Johannesburg, National Botanical Institutes in Cape Town and Pretoria, the South African embassies in London, Rome and New York and in numerous private collections. Dixie's niece,

Dorothy Barclay Dorothy Barclay (1892 Cape Town - 1940 Cape Town) was a South African botanical illustrator, and the niece of Ethel May Dixie. The Wild Flower Protection Society had been started by the Mountain Club of South Africa in 1912 and had published 'Natu ...

, was also an botanical artist.

Publications

* ''The Flora of South Africa''- with

6 vols. (Cape Town, Darter Bros. & Co.; London, W. Wesley & Son, 1913-1932) * ''Wild Flowers of the Cape of Good Hope'' - with

Robert Harold Compton Robert Harold Compton (6 August 1886 in Tewkesbury – 11 July 1979 in Cape Town) was a South African botanist. The Compton Herbarium at Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, which he founded in Cape Town in 1939, was named in his honour. C ...

(Janda Press, Cape Town 1953) * Two portfolios of prints published privately in 1990s.

External links

Plantweb gallery
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Dixie, Ethel May 1876 births 1973 deaths 20th-century South African painters 20th-century South African women artists Artists from Cape Town South African botanical illustrators South African people of British descent South African women artists Academic staff of the University of Cape Town