Katie: I’m in the final stages of writing up my dissertation, and all along I’ve been writing with the book in mind. There are a few books out there already, but they have all treated North as an anomaly in the “intrepid spinster” vein. I don’t want to downplay North’s extraordinary achievements and personality, but to really understand her work and its value beyond its eccentricity, we need a more complete narrative. North’s individualized vision and visualizations, however idiosyncratic, were a rather ordinary part of the late-Victorian botanical enterprise. I see North’s work as equal in many ways with that of Charles Darwin, Asa Gray, and Joseph Hooker – and so did they! This is the story I have told in my dissertation, and this is the story I want the world beyond my dissertation committee to know. I plan to defend later this summer and will dedicate part of next year to turning the work into a manuscript for publication. It’s important to me to reach a wider audience for a couple of reasons. First, and simply, North is fascinating and more people should know about her life and work. Second, North’s experience has a lot to teach us about the supposed divide between art and science, amateur and professional, feminine and masculine, and individuals and communities…including the conclusion that sometimes, when it comes to the important human enterprise of making knowledge, such divides may not be there at all. We all have shared roles in making things known.

Katie: I would say North’s motivations for traveling and painting changed more than her style ever did. Her choice of specimens, indeed her choice of destination, became much more pointed towards the end of her career and especially after Sir Joseph accepted North’s offer to build a gallery at Kew. Once North knew her work would be on permanent display, she became concerned with “completing” her collection. Whereas her first few journeys were made almost at whim, her last few were concerted, out-of-the-way expeditions to places that would fill perceived “holes” in the collection. There was, beyond this, one other important turning-point for the direction and intent of North’s project. During her first trip abroad, to Canada and the United States in 1871, North met members of the Hudson River School in New York and was greatly influenced by Frederick Edwin Church and, later, Martin Johnson Heade. North’s orchid paintings have been compared to those made by Heade, and the overall visual resonance between Church, and especially Heade’s work and North’s own is striking and indicative that theirs was in many ways a shared approach to delineating the physiognomy, or face, of nature. North’s association with Church was strong and lasting, and she would visit him and his family again in 1881, ten years after their first meeting.

Katie: Yes, she does – and the answer is really interesting in terms of getting a handle on North’s motivations for painting and her self-image as an artist. North took watercolor lessons as a young woman, but once she tried oil painting she found it to be “a vice like dram-drinking, almost impossible to leave off once it gets possession of one.” Besides enjoying the feel and effects of oil colors, it is important to note that North was not a botanical illustrator. If we examine North’s oil sketches within this tradition, the only conclusion that can be, and has too often been made, is that she was bad at her work. This isn’t helpful for reconstructing what it was she was doing. North’s project is more closely aligned with the kind of work being done by the Hudson River School painters in North America, who travelled throughout the United States, the Arctic, Jamaica, and South and Central America with the goal of painting the beauty, unity, and character of nature – and who did so in oils. For North, it wasn’t interesting to paint an uprooted, idealized type-specimen against a white background as per botanical illustration. Instead, she treated the plants and botanical landscapes she encountered as individuals and groups of individuals met with in distinctive settings, all of which she wanted to portray with the vibrancy and materiality of the original encounter, a task best done with oils.

Katie: It is impressive! Calculated out it’s something like one painting every six days for fourteen years! And when we consider that the majority of this work was done on-the-spot in distant locales, the achievement becomes even more impressive. There are a few factors that made North’s project as prodigious as it was: first, and a great lesson to all, was the possession of an extraordinary work ethic. North woke early and worked through all kinds of weather, sometimes for up to twelve hours a day. She also famously preferred plants to people, and was often able to carve extra time to work by excusing herself from the many social obligations central to colonial and ex-pat community life in the places she visited. In Sarawak, for example, North excused herself to Rajah Brooke’s hillside cottage for as long her food held out. “I stayed, she recalled, “till I had eaten all the chickens, and the last remains of my bread had turned blue.” There she painted in peace and managed to avoid the extended celebrations held at the Government House below. This being said, North would not have been nearly so prolific had the people behind the official and unofficial institutions of empire not been in place. Railroads, roads, bridges, steamships, colonial botanical gardens, and the officials responsible for them were all vital to North’s extensive travels and provided her with relatively easy access to specimens and landscapes. Another key to the breakneck pace North kept was her painterly style. Even her most carefully executed landscapes are better described as “oil sketches” when compared to the work of contemporary professional artists like her friends Edward Lear, Frederic Edwin Church, and William Holman Hunt. North worked quickly with the goal of visually cataloging botanical nature, and thus she didn’t worry about things like underpaintings and other conventions typical of oil painting. She was interested in accuracy, and part of accurately painting botanical nature was to capture its abundance, so for North, painting much quickly was more important than painting little slowly.

As for the heat of the tropics, which you’ve no doubt experienced on your own travels, North doesn’t seem to have been too uncomfortable. She suffered severely from rheumatism, and for that reason preferred the heat of places like Jamaica and Brazil to the climate of her native Hastings. Escaping the cold and damp of England was a prime motivation for her travels and choice of destination. Still, she avoided being outside during peak heat hours, preferring instead to do her out-of-doors work in the early mornings and evenings. When she wasn’t working “on the spot,” she would retreat to a rented cottage, cabin, or guest-house where she could continue to paint from specimens collected on hikes or brought to her by local children. She also painted a good number of views from various verandahs across the globe, since she was always careful to choose rooms with views worth painting.

North usually stayed in a country for at least a few months, sometimes up to a couple of years at a time. She hired guides for her more rigorous journeys down rivers on canoes, through jungles on foot, and on horseback over mountain passes. She preferred to paint living plants en plein air (not wanting to destroy the lives of those she considered friends). But she, and sometimes her guides, also collected specimens on the go for her to paint later at a camp or cottage destination. She was most productive, however, when the directors of local botanical gardens in places like Singapore, Brisbane, and Kandy allowed her to stay in a guestroom and paint their collections at leisure for days on end. Even this more stationary aspect of her project was grueling work, and required an enormous amount of dedication, stamina, and discomfort to achieve.

Katie: Yes, absolutely. There are several running themes in North’s work that are telling of the kinds of stories she wanted to capture and put on display. First among these was the sheer abundance and variety of botanical nature. North rarely painted the same thing twice, and opted instead to portray as many different species and genera as she could find in as many different corners of the globe as she could get to. North was also concerned by the negative effects that injudicious human practices, both colonial and indigenous, had on the views and plants she traveled so hard to paint. To draw attention to problems caused by things like over-grazing, deforestation, and mining operations, North painted the landscapes and species most in danger of extirpation and gave these paintings titles that made the reasons for their endangerment explicit. In so doing, hers is an early voice of the conservationist spirit. Another theme cultivated in North’s imagery is the Darwinian character of botanical nature. By the time the gallery opened in 1882, the year of Charles Darwin’s death, the fact of evolution was not contested so much as the mechanism of natural selection, Darwin’s theory to explain how species evolved over time. North, who had met with and greatly admired Darwin, visualized natural selection in some very novel ways, helping to popularize Darwin’s ideas as well as an evolutionary understanding of the behaviors, adaptations, and distribution of botanical nature.

Katie: One of the really fascinating things to me about North’s life and work is how such an individual and solitary woman, pursuing an equally individual project, was actually a fairly ordinary part of a broader, and highly social, botanical enterprise. We can see this very nicely when we look closely at the North Gallery as a space and the ways in which that space transcended its walls to become an integrated part of the gardens and the world beyond. Looking at how the gallery functioned as a built environment allows us to chart, in a very real way, how the botanical specimens and landscapes North observed and recorded moved from continent to continent and from picture plane to guidebook to an article in the periodical press. My goal was not just to trace the arc of such movements, but to determine what the transit of North’s imagery can tell us about the broader practices that shaped how botanical knowledge itself was made. North’s observational and representational practices, in particular, relocates her place within the late-Victorian scientific enterprise from the periphery, where historians have typically placed her, to a more central location occupied by a multitude of fellow botanical observers. Charting the spatial geography of the North Gallery also allows us to better appreciate the ways that space encouraged the entanglement of imagery, text, scientific expertise, and visitor experience – an entanglement that had consequences for the making and movement of botanical knowledge. What was known about plants was not only determined in herbariums, laboratories, and the field by professional botanists, physiologists, and naturalists, but was also built by painters like North and even her audience at Kew.