Flora Indica

For the first time, Kew's recovered collections of Indian botanical art are brought together with the remarkable stories of the artists who painted them, the colonial context in which they were made, and their essential role in the development of botanical knowledge. Featuring a representative selection of one hundred artworks from the previously fractured, uncatalogued, and largely inaccessible collection of over seven thousand Indian illustrations in Kew's archives, Flora Indica foregrounds the vital role of Indian artists in helping to advance both scientific knowledge and the aesthetics of botanical art. The botanical watercolors, created between 1790 and 1850, were commissioned by British botanists, many of whom were employed by the East India Company to document India's rich plant diversity. The text by leading expert Henry Noltie reveals the lost stories of how these illustrations came to be, exploring the work of twenty Indian artists from eleven collections, with nineteen named individuals and thirty previously unseen illustrations. Noltie's extensive research into these hidden histories features plants native to South Asia alongside exotics introduced from the then-emerging international network of botanical gardens, taking readers on a journey that explores the environments in which these master artists worked. The style of the works represents a unique fusion of traditional Indian artistry and techniques with botanists' demands for naturalism and scientific specificity from an Indo-British perspective. Presented with a foreword by art historian William Dalrymple, Flora Indica illuminates Kew's beautiful Indian botanical art collection, through which readers are invited to discover the important lost histories of Indian botanical art from the age of empire.