The otherworldly artist who made his name at The Spectator

There is something otherworldly about Rory McEwen’s paintings of plants, leaves and fruit. They are indisputably beautiful, often breathtakingly so, but they are almost eerie in their self-possession. They are like planets vibrating to the music of the spheres – quivering with arrested energy. These images are super-real (rather than surreal) but they sometimes have a surreal edge that can be disturbing.

Although best known for painting these botanical watercolours on vellum, Mc-Ewen (1932–82) was a man of many parts: an extraordinarily talented figure, a poet and broadcaster, a folk and blues musician as well as, for many, the greatest botanical painter of the past hundred years. His friend Grey Gowrie wrote: ‘You would need to combine the talents of Proust and John Buchan to describe him.’

McEwen was fourth in a family of seven children, born at Marchmont in the Scottish Borders. He painted flowers from the age of eight, instructed by a French governess. Wilfrid Blunt, author of a seminal history of botanical illustration, taught him at Eton and showed him the great flower painters of the past. McEwen’s great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side was John Lindley, the distinguished botanist, gardener and orchidologist. To this culturally rich heritage he brought his own enquiring mind. Much later he wrote: ‘I paint flowers as a way of getting as close as possible to what I perceive as the truth, my truth of the time in which I live.’

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There have been regular exhibitions of McEwen’s botanical works. The last one I saw was at Kew Gardens a decade ago, which I reviewed in these pages.