Margaret Ursula Mee (1909-1988) was an internationally recognized British botanical artist. She received most of her fame as she specialized in drawing and painting the botanical art specimens she saw in the Amazonian rain forest. She was an avid explorer of the Amazon basin and part of her later fame was due to the fact that she fought tooth and nail against the commercial exploitation of the natural bounty of the Amazonian rain forest.
She received a diploma in painting in painting and design at the national level in 1950. She studied art first in Dr. Challoner's Grammar School, then in St. Martin's School of Art, and finally at the Camberwell School of Art in London. It was there that she met her second husband to be, Greville Mee.
She then moved to Brazil with him in 1952 mainly to commence teaching art at the British school at Sao Paulo. It was in Sao Paolo that she later became a botanical artist for the Instituto de Botanica in the year 1958. Her interest grew in the rain forest in the state of Amazonas and from 1964 onwards she systematically explored it. During her sojourn she took to painting many of the exotic botanical specimens she saw there. She also collected some of them for illustrating later at her own convenience.
She also wrote a lot during and about her exploration and maintained 15 diaries, in which she described what she saw. She drew most of the botanical art in about 40 sketchbooks and approximately 400 folios containing gouache illustrations.
Margaret Mee was botanical artist par excellence. She was of a scientific bent of mind and an explorer and a conservationist. Considering that she was all the time moving through the rainforest, the skillful and scientifically accurate rendition of the botanical specimens by her are of a consistently high quality. The wonder is that she used for all her drawings and paintings simply a pencil to sketch and gouache to paint.
The importance of Margaret Mee's work is that most of it is of specimens that have not been identified hitherto in their natural habitat by anyone. So that also makes her a pioneer, who brought many botanical plants and flowers before the world for the first time. An example of this is of Neoregelia margareteae, among many other such floras, which is known solely through her work.
Margaret Mee is also known as the lead conservationist of the Amazonian rain forest in Brazil. Her contribution in this is truly praiseworthy. In 1988, with her husband, she founded the Margaret Mee Amazon Trust that was to become the vanguard of spreading educational awareness among the people of the importance of conserving the rain forest. Unfortunately, Margaret Mee died the same year in a car crash in England. She leaves behind her legacy of over 400 paintings, all of them great pieces of botanical art.
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