Marianne North: Teneriffe

"A View of the Botanic Garden, Teneriffe"
by Marianne North

"The winter after my return from Brazil I devoted to learning to etch on copper, Mr. Edwin Edwardes, who had illustrated the old inns of England, kindly giving me a few lessons. The winter was an unusually cold one. After the experiences of the last two in Jamaica and Brazil I found it quite unbearable, so at last I determined to follow the sun to Teneriffe. A friend and I started on New Year's day, 1875, in hard frost and snow, steaming from Liverpool in a wretched little steamer in unpleasant squally weather.

On the 11th we landed for a few hours in sunny Madeira, on the 13th in Santa Cruz, then drove on the same day to Villa de Orotava. We found there was a hotel (and not a very bad one either) and we got possession of its huge ballroom, which was full of crockery and looking-glasses, and some hundred chairs all piled up on the top of one another. This room had glass doors, but served to sleep in well enough, and I determined to stay and make the best of it, for the climate and views were quite perfect. I stayed more than a month. I had gotten a letter to the Swiss manager of the Botanic Gardens, who also kept a grocer's shop. He was very kind in taking me to see the most lovely gardens. When the good people found my hobby for painting strange plants, they sent me all kinds of beautiful specimens.

I remained quietly working in or about Orotava till the 17th of February, when I moved down to Mr. S.'s comfortable home at Puerto di Orotava. I had a room on the roof with a separate staircase down to the lovely garden, learned to know every plant in that exquisite collection. I scarcely ever went out without finding some new wonder to paint, lived a life of the most perfect peace and happiness, and got strength every day with my kind friends. 

Santa Cruz, to which I at first took a dislike, I found full of beauty. I stayed there till the 'Ehiopia' picked me up and arrived in London on the 8th of May."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "A Vision of Eden: The Life and Work of Marianne North" by Marianne North.)

Marianne North: To Brazil, 1872-73

"View from the Sierra of Petropolis, Brazil, with the
Bay of Rio, its Islands and the Sugarloaf Mountain in the
Distance" by Marianne North

After a two months stay in England, Marianne North began to think of carrying out her plan of going to Brazil, to continue the collection of studies of tropical plants which she had begun in Jamaica. She wrote:

"In August 1872 we cast anchor into the beautiful Bay of Rio, which certainly is the most lovely seascape in the world. I know nothing more trying to a shy person than landing for the first time among a strange people and language, I always dread it, but I soon felt myself at home in Rio, and in a few days had a large airy room and dressing room at the top of the hotel, with views from the windows which in every changing mood of the weather were a real pleasure to study. 

I went by mule car every day to the famous Botanical Gardens, about four miles off, a never-ending delight to me; and, as the good Austrian director allowed me to keep my easel and other things at his house, I felt quite at home there, and for some time worked every day and all day under its shady avenues, only returning at sunset to dine and rest. 

Of course my first work was to attempt to make a sketch of the great avenue of royal palms which has been so often described. It is half a mile long at least, and the trees are 100 feet high, though only thirty years old. After a fortnight's daily work there the weather became cloudy, and I brought home flowers of fish to work at, my landlord kindly letting me go with him any morning I liked to the wonderful market, where the oddest fish were to be found, and where boatloads of oranges were landed and sold all day long on the quayside.

I spent some days in walking and sketching on the hills behind the city. In this neighbourhood I saw many curious sights. One day six monkeys with long tails and gray whiskers were chattering in one tree, and allowed me to come up close underneath and watch their games through my opera glass. The most awkward of all animals, the sloth, also spent his dull life on the branches, slowly eating up the young shoots and hugging them with his hooked feet, preferring to hang and sleep head downwards.

I also had a letter from my father's old friend to the Emperor, who kindly gave me a special appointment in the morning, and spent more than an hour examining my paintings and talking them over, telling me the names and qualities of different plants which I did not know myself. He then took the whole mass (no small weight) in his arms, and carried them in to show the Empress, telling me to follow. She was also very kind with a sweet, gentle manner.

I wandered and wondered at everything, and people were extremely curious to know why I was travelling alone and painting. Did the Government pay my expenses? I certainly could not pay them myself, I was too shabbily dressed for that! I told them when I got home I hoped to paint a picture and sell it for so much money that I would pay all my expenses...and that they understood."

[After a year of travel and painting throughout the country, Marianne returned to England, landing at Southampton on the 14th of September.]

To be continued

(Excerpts from "A Vision of Eden: The Life and Work of Marianne North" by Marianne North.)

Marianne North: Painting in Jamaica

Marianne North at the Easel

"After about a month of perfect quiet and incessant painting at the garden house, people began to find me out. The K's rode down and made me promise to come to their cottage for a night. Their home was a thousand feet higher than mind, with a most lovely view and bamboo all round it, the first large specimens I ever saw. They made me feel in another world among their rattling, creaking, croaking, cork-drawing noises. Some of the cans must have been fifty feet high, thicker than my arm and full of varied colour. 

I began a sketch of the bamboo the next morning, then went on a mile along the ridge to stay with Captain and Mrs. H and the old deaf General Commander-in-Chief, in a bare tumble-down old house, supported by two weird old cotton trees and a sandbox tree, built on the very edge of the precipitous wall of the valley. 

Captain Lanyon came up with the Governor's orders that I was not to go down the hill without coming to stay at Craigton, but I wanted more clothes and paints, so Captain H. promised me a horse at six the next morning to take me and bring me back, but when I got up I found the house like a tomb, not a creature stirring.

I got out of my window, only a yard above the ground, and went down to the stable: all asleep too, and the sun rising so gloriously! I could not waste time, so took my painting things and walked off to finish my sketch at the K's. They sent me out some tea, and I afterwards walked on down the hill among the ebony trees and aloes, to my home. After a rummage and a bath I went up the hill again, with old Stewart carrying my portmanteau on the top of his head. I reached Craigton just after sunset. The house was a mere cottage, but so homelike in its lovely garden, blazing with red dracaenas and poinsettias looking redder in the sunset rays, that I felt at home at once. 

My first study was of a slender tree fern with leaves like lacework, then in the afternoon I painted in the garden, with the benefit of the tea and gossip which went on near me, sitting under a huge mango."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "A Vision of Eden: the Life and Work of Marianne North.")

Marianne North: To the Tropics

"Night Flowering Lily and Ferns, Jamaica"
by Marianne North

After a trip to Europe in 1869, Marianne North's father became very ill. She sadly recounted, "The last words in his mouth were, 'Come and give me a kiss, Pop, I am only going to sleep.' He never woke again and left me indeed alone.

For nearly forty years he had been my one friend and companion, and now I had to learn to live without him, and to fill up my life with other interests as I best might. I wished to be alone. I could not bear to talk of him or of anything else. As soon as the household at Hastings was broken up, I went straight to Mentone to devote myself to painting from nature, and try to learn from the lovely world which surrounded me there how to make that work henceforth the master of my life.

I had long had the dream of going to some tropical country to paint its peculiar vegetation on the spot in natural abundant luxuriance. So when my friend Mrs. S. asked me to come and spend the summer with her in the United States, I thought this might easily be made into a first step for carrying out my plan."

[Marianne's American friends gave her a delightful and interesting tour of the northeast, which included painting Niagara Falls and visiting with President Ulysses Grant and his family in the White House, after which she sailed to Jamaica.]

She excitedly wrote: "In the West Indies at last - on Christmas Eve! I rented a house, half hidden amongst the glorious foliage of the long-deserted botanical gardens of the first settlers. From my verandah I could see up and down the steep valley covered with trees and woods; higher up were meadows. The richest foliage closed quite up to the little terrace on which the house stood; bananas, rose-apples, gigantic bread fruit, trumpet trees with great white-lined leaves, star apples with brown and gold plush lining to their shiny leaves, the mahogany trees, mangoes, custard apples, and endless others. Over all a giant cotton tree quite 200 feet high stood up like a ghost against the forest of evergreen trees, only colored by the quantities of orchids, wild pines and other parasites which had lodged themselves in its soft bark and branches. I painted all day, going out at daylight and not returning until noon, after which I worked at flowers in the house."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "A Vision of Eden: The Life and Work of Marianne North.")