FLOWERING ART OF SCIENCE

DENISE ROUGHAN

DESCRIPTION Karaka — Corynocarpus laevigata, 1890s

MAKER / ARTIST Sarah Ann Featon (1848–1927)

REFERENCE New Zealand flower studies not published in The Art Album of New Zealand Flora, c. 1889–1926 (A-171-021) Sarah Featon was among the earliest women botanical artists to make a distinguished contribution to the art of scientific illustration in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Nobody is sure when Sarah Ann Porter (1848–1927) arrived in New Zealand from London, but in 1870, aged 22, she married 30-year-old public servant Edward Featon (1840–1909) in Auckland. As a young woman immigrant, perhaps she would have struggled with the hardships that she faced in an unfamiliar country, but she also obviously came equipped with some level of artistic training as well as curiosity about the unique natural world that surrounded her.

Sarah put her skill as a watercolourist to practical use, becoming one of a growing number of women taking an interest in capturing images of plant life here. That interest developed into an enterprising publishing project. Together with her husband, who wrote the accompanying text, she compiled a collection of 40 drawings that resulted in The Art Album of New Zealand Flora. The work was subtitled as ‘being a systematic and popular description of the native flowering plants of New Zealand and the adjacent islands’. The Featons hoped it would help to debunk the popular misconception at ‘home’ (in mother England) that there were no flowers in New Zealand.

The first fully coloured art book to be printed in New Zealand, The Art Album was originally published in three parts between 1887 and 1888, and complete, as ‘Volume 1’, in 1889. It referenced the English botanist Joseph Hooker’s scientific (and rather drier) two-volume Handbook of the New Zealand Flora (1864, 1867), but was nonetheless more accessible for amateurs, whose interest in local flora was increasing. The couple also made a point of calling it an ‘art album’.

The work was so impressive that, in 1897, a copy was gifted to Queen Victoria, presented in a purpose-made casket crafted from indigenous woods, to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee.

The original drawings for the published album are now housed at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; the collection of 47 in the Turnbull Library is catalogued as ‘those not published’ in the album. These are dated from the late 1890s to about 1925, and were likely intended for two further volumes planned for publication. Sadly, these did not ever eventuate, probably because of the prohibitive cost of the lithography.