Margaret Ursula Mee,
MBE Mbe may refer to:
* Mbé, a town in the Republic of the Congo
* Mbe Mountains Community Forest, in Nigeria
* Mbe language, a language of Nigeria
* Mbe' language, language of Cameroon
* ''mbe'', ISO 639 code for the extinct Molala language
Molal ...
(22 May 1909 – 30 November 1988) was a British
botanical artist
Botanical illustration is the art of depicting the form, color, and details of plant species, frequently in watercolor paintings. They must be scientifically accurate but often also have an artistic component and may be printed with a botanical ...
who specialised in plants from the
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
ian
Amazon Rainforest. She was also one of the first environmentalists to draw attention to the impact of large-scale mining and deforestation on the
Amazon Basin.
Early life
Margaret Ursula Brown was born in Whitehill,
Chesham
Chesham (, , or ) is a market town and civil parish in Buckinghamshire, England, south-east of the county town of Aylesbury, north-west of central London, and part of the London commuter belt. It is in the Chess Valley, surrounded by farmla ...
, in 1909. She attended
Dr Challoner's Grammar School
Dr Challoner's Grammar School (also known as DCGS, Challoner's Boys or simply Challoner's) is a selective grammar school for boys, with a co-educational Sixth Form, in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, England. It was given academy status in January ...
,
Amersham, followed by
The School of Art, Science and Commerce,
Watford
Watford () is a town and borough in Hertfordshire, England, 15 miles northwest of Central London, on the River Colne.
Initially a small market town, the Grand Junction Canal encouraged the construction of paper-making mills, print works, and ...
. After a short period of teaching in
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. With a population of in 2019, it is the 10th largest English district by population and its metropolitan area is the fifth largest in the United Kingdom, with a populat ...
she decided to travel abroad.
While in
Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...
in 1933, Brown witnessed the
burning of the Reichstag
The Reichstag fire (german: Reichstagsbrand, ) was an arson attack on the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin, on Monday 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of ...
and subsequent
Jewish boycott, which confirmed her left-wing views. During the
Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...
she worked in
Hatfield as a draughtswoman at the
de Havilland aircraft factory.
[Margaret Mee profile]
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Personal life
Mee married Reginald Bruce Bartlett in January 1936. Like her husband, she became a committed trade union activist for the
Union of Sign, Glass and Ticket Writers and joined the
Communist Party
A communist party is a political party that seeks to realize the socio-economic goals of communism. The term ''communist party'' was popularized by the title of ''The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. ...
. Mee addressed the
TUC in 1937, proposing the raising of the school-leaving age and was subsequently offered, but declined, a job with
Ernest Bevin
Ernest Bevin (9 March 1881 – 14 April 1951) was a British statesman, trade union leader, and Labour Party politician. He co-founded and served as General Secretary of the powerful Transport and General Workers' Union in the years 1922–194 ...
. The marriage to Bartlett was not happy and, after a long separation, ended in divorce in 1943. She married Greville Mee, her second husband, in 1980.
After the war Mee studied art at
St Martin's School of Art in London. In 1950 she attended the
Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts
Camberwell College of Arts is a public tertiary art school in Camberwell, in London, England. It is one of the six constituent colleges of the University of the Arts London. It offers further and higher education programmes, including postgra ...
, where she learnt her style of illustration, and received a national diploma in painting and design in 1950.
She moved to Brazil in 1952 to teach art in the British school of
São Paulo, where Greville Mee later joined her. Her first expedition was in 1956 to
Belém
Belém (; Portuguese for Bethlehem; initially called Nossa Senhora de Belém do Grão-Pará, in English Our Lady of Bethlehem of Great Pará) often called Belém of Pará, is a Brazilian city, capital and largest city of the state of Pará in t ...
in the Amazon Basin. She then became a botanical artist for São Paulo's
Instituto de Botanica in 1958, exploring the rainforest and more specifically
Amazonas state from 1964, painting the plants she saw, some new to science, as well as collecting some for later illustration. She created 400
folio
The term "folio" (), has three interconnected but distinct meanings in the world of books and printing: first, it is a term for a common method of arranging sheets of paper into book form, folding the sheet only once, and a term for a book ma ...
s of
gouache
Gouache (; ), body color, or opaque watercolor is a water-medium paint consisting of natural pigment, water, a binding agent (usually gum arabic or dextrin), and sometimes additional inert material. Gouache is designed to be opaque. Gouache ...
illustrations, 40 sketchbooks, and 15 diaries.
Mee travelled to
Washington D. C.
)
, image_skyline =
, image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...
, USA, in 1964 and briefly to England in 1968 for the exhibition and publication of her book, ''Flowers of the Brazilian Forests''. She gave a lecture in Washington D. C., USA in 1967.
She returned to Brazil and joined protests to draw international attention to the deforestation of the Amazon region.
[
Mee travelled to London in 1988 for the publication of her book ''In Search of Flowers of the Amazon Forests''. She gave a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society and travelled to the US to publicize the book, where she was interviewed on the MacNeil Lehrer Newshour programme, an interview which was repeated two days later following her death.
]
Death
Mee died following a car crash in Seagrave
Seagrave is a village and civil parish in the Charnwood district of Leicestershire, England. It has a population of around 500, measured at the 2011 census as 546, It is north of Sileby and close to Thrussington and Barrow upon Soar.
Histo ...
, Leicestershire, on 30 November 1988. She was 79. In January 1989 a memorial to her life, botanical work and environmental campaigning took place in Kew Gardens
Kew Gardens is a botanic garden in southwest London that houses the "largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world". Founded in 1840, from the exotic garden at Kew Park, its living collections include some of the ...
.[
]
Recognition and honours
In 1976 Mee was awarded the MBE Mbe may refer to:
* Mbé, a town in the Republic of the Congo
* Mbe Mountains Community Forest, in Nigeria
* Mbe language, a language of Nigeria
* Mbe' language, language of Cameroon
* ''mbe'', ISO 639 code for the extinct Molala language
Molal ...
for services to Brazilian botany and a fellowship of the Linnean Society
The Linnean Society of London is a learned society dedicated to the study and dissemination of information concerning natural history, evolution, and taxonomy. It possesses several important biological specimen, manuscript and literature colle ...
in 1986. She also received recognition in Brazil including an honorary citizenship of Rio in 1975 and the Brazilian order of Cruzeiro do Sul in 1979. In her honour, after her death the Margaret Mee Amazon Trust was founded to further education and research in Amazonian plant life and conservation
Conservation is the preservation or efficient use of resources, or the conservation of various quantities under physical laws.
Conservation may also refer to:
Environment and natural resources
* Nature conservation, the protection and managem ...
. It closed in 1996 but the fellowships it provided for Brazilian botanical students and plant illustrators who wished to study in the United Kingdom continued.
In 1990 Mee was recognised for her environmental achievements by The United Nations
The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmonizi ...
Environment Programme (UNEP) and added to its Global 500 Roll of Honour The Global 500 Roll of Honour was an award given from 1987 to 2003 by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The award recognized the environmental achievements of individuals and organizations around the world. A successor system of UNEP ...
.
''In Search of Flowers of the Amazon Forests'', the Diaries of botanical artist Margaret Mee written between 1956 and 1988, was published in 1988 and included an illustrated account of Mee's expeditions to the Amazonian forests, the last of which was in search of the elusive Selenicereus cacti, also known as the Amazon Moonflower, opening at night. Most of her illustrations are now part of the Kew Gardens
Kew Gardens is a botanic garden in southwest London that houses the "largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world". Founded in 1840, from the exotic garden at Kew Park, its living collections include some of the ...
collection."Brazil: The lady who loved the river"
/ref>
In July 2020 a virtual exhibition of 20 of her paintings from Amazon exhibitions was shown by the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, Washington
Washington commonly refers to:
* Washington (state), United States
* Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States
** A metonym for the federal government of the United States
** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered o ...
, USA. They had been acquired by Mildred Bliss in 1966 and 1967.
See also
* Margaret Mee and the Moonflower
References
Selected bibliography
*
*
*
* Mee, Margaret, Mayo, Simon ''Margaret Mee's Amazon'', Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew 1988
*
*
*
* Mee, Margaret (2006) ''Anos de Vida e Obra''. Arte Padilla Rio de Janeiro ISBN 85-98746-02-9
*
External links
Oppenheimer Kew Gardens Edition
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mee, Margaret
1909 births
1988 deaths
Communist Party of Great Britain members
Fellows of the Linnean Society of London
Botanical illustrators
People from Chesham
Road incident deaths in England
Members of the Order of the British Empire
People educated at Dr Challoner's Grammar School
Alumni of Saint Martin's School of Art