Mary, Marianne Margaret and the flowers of the rāj

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century the expansion of the British Empire in Asia, as well as in other parts of the world, would generate the need to illustrate the new scientific discoveries of flora and fauna with the greatest precision, as well as the visual translation of the foreign architecture and landscapes through the picturesque language. The act of painting nature abroad, whether for scientific or creative purposes, became a secular fashion starring upper-class travelers who at that time ventured to explore the new places, gradually colonized by the Oriental idea. Coinciding with the emergence of the feminist movements in the West, the following article explores these ideas through the pictorial works of three Victorian women living in India at different stages of development of the rāj, as well as in different contexts. Lovers of gardens and passionate about botany, these women dedicated much of their time to include the country´s creative forms of flora and fauna in their drawings, paintings, or photographs from 1850. At the same time, these Victorian women were encountered with an exuberantly erotic India, still underlying at the fringes of the Empire, and very much present in the traditional art and culture. Based on the scientific illustrations of Mary Impey, the garden paintings of Marianne North and the theatrical photographs of Margaret Cameron, this article concludes that the analysis of these three women´s floral works should be carried out not only as a documentary-colonial act, but above all as a way of unleashing the erotic and sensual character intrinsic to their feminine condition. Having been their sexuality repressed as women of the rāj, and rediscovered through their encounter with the eastern nature.