Private patronage

Sir Edwin Lutyens reckoned that there will never be great architects or architecture without great patrons, and I rather think the same is true of botanical art. The exhibition presently on show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, entitled A New Flowering: 1,000 Years of Botanical Art, seems to reinforce the point. Displayed are works by the greats of the past — Besler, Ehret, Redouté, Jacquin and the Bauer brothers — all of whom were dependent on imaginative private patronage, and these hang alongside paintings by more than a score of contemporary artists from the collection of one patron, Dr Shirley Sherwood.

She is the guest curator of the exhibition and, incidentally, wife of James Sherwood, chairman of Orient-Express Hotels. It has been Dr Sherwood’s interest and generous patronage of many botanical artists worldwide since 1990 which has helped to promote what she calls, in the illuminating catalogue which accompanies the exhibition, ‘a new Golden Age’ for botanical art.