Margaret Mee
The diminutive artist who painted rare and exotic plants in the Brazilian Amazon Rain Forest.
Margaret Mee created 40 folios of gouache illustrations, 40 sketchbooks and 15 diaries. She explored the Brazilian Jungles on numerous expeditions between 1958 and 1988.
Most of her illustrations are now part of the Kew Garden collection.
Mee was a botanical artist par excellence who brought many botanical plants and flowers before the world for the first time.
deepbrazil.com
In November 1988, I watched an interview with MacNeil on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour with Margaret Mee. Throughout the entire interview, the usual somber MacNeil could not stop from smiling, especially when Ms Mee recites an incident where she held off a bunch of drunken prospectors with her revolver.
Here is the interview repeated on the show after her tragic death following a car crash in Seagrave, Leicestershire, England on November 30, 1988. She was only 79 years old.
http://huntbot.andrew.cmu.edu/HIBD/Departments/Art/Mee.shtml
Gina
All images (except the last) are from her book "In search of Flowers of the Amazon Forests"