Marion Satterlee (8 January 1868 – 9 June 1965) was an American botanical artist who in 1893 illustrated the first

field guide A field guide is a book designed to help the reader identify wildlife (flora or fauna) or other objects of natural occurrence (e.g. rocks and minerals). It is generally designed to be brought into the "field" or local area where such objects exi ...

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Car ...

n wildflowers.

Artwork

Marion Satterlee was a friend of the naturalist and author Frances Theodora Parsons, and their walks together inspired Parsons to sit down and write her long-meditated first book, ''How to Know the Wild Flowers'' (1893). At Parsons' insistence, Satterlee illustrated both this book and its sequel, ''How to Know the Ferns'' (1899). For ''How to Know the Wild Flowers''—which was the first field guide to North American wildflowers and a great popular success that stayed in print into the 1940s—she created 110 full-page black-and-white illustrations, which were complemented by color plates by Elsie Louise Shaw. The writer and ''New Yorker'' editor

Katharine Sergeant Angell White Katharine Sergeant Angell White (September 17, 1892 – July 20, 1977) was a writer and the fiction editor for ''The New Yorker'' magazine from 1925 to 1960.Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2007. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farming ...

, writing many decades later, termed the book a classic and remarked on the excellence of Satterlee's line drawings. For ''How to Know the Ferns'', Satterlee and a second artist, Alice Josephine Smith, created 42 full-page plates and over two dozen smaller black-and-white illustrations from pen drawings. (The illustrations include initials, either a.j.s or MS, to identify the artist of each drawing.) Satterlee also provided a description of the '' Woodwardia'' ferns.

Personal history

Satterlee lived in New York City, and she apparently took some courses in plant illustration after Parsons asked her to illustrate ''How to Know the Wild Flowers''. Other information about her origins and upbringing is scarce. Given the social circles she moved in as a friend of Parsons, she may be the Marion Satterlee who was a sister of lawyer and government official

Herbert L. Satterlee Herbert Livingston Satterlee (October 31, 1863 – July 14, 1947) was an American lawyer, writer, and businessman who served as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1908 to 1909. Early life Herbert Livingston Satterlee was born in New York Cit ...

. If so, her parents were George Bowen Satterlee and Sarah (Wilcox) Satterlee.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Satterlee, Marion American illustrators American botanical illustrators 19th-century American women artists 1868 births 1965 deaths