Meet the Women Illustrators of the Pomological Watercolor Collection
Every three hours, one weirdly charming Twitter feed posts a yellowed illustration of a fruit or nut from the National Agriculture Library’s Pomological Watercolor Collection. @pomolgical is a bot coded by artist and activist Parker Higgins, who helped convince the USDA to remove the paywall to the collection, ensuring public access to even the high-resolution images.
The Pomological Watercolor Collection comprises over 7,500 paintings, lithographs, and line drawings of fruit and nuts. These pieces were originally commissioned by the USDA between 1886 and 1942 as part of a documentary effort that gave scientists and farmers alike comprehensive access to a database of technical, encyclopedic information at a time when the U.S.’s commercial fruit production was booming.
These old fruit pictures—often quite photographic—offer enjoyment and historical curiosity but also highlight women’s role in the creation of modern botanical illustration and continuous debates about the overlap of art and science, as well as the creation and ownership of both.
At the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, farmers worked with the USDA to establish orchards across the country as many new fruits were introduced and gained momentum. The Division of Pomology was established in 1886 to document and disseminate information about new research to these farmers and breeders. Rather than the now-ubiquitous photograph, which hadn’t yet become a reliable documentary medium, the USDA relied on highly skilled artists to depict its cultivars and new varieties collected from abroad.
“Showing the natural size, shape, and color of both exterior and interior of the fruit, with the leaves and twigs characteristic of each,” noted the first chief of the Division of Pomology, Henry E. Van Deman, these paintings were “invaluable for comparison and reference, and a portion for publication.”
The Pomological Watercolor Collection’s thousands of paintings were mostly produced by just nine of the USDA’s artists, six of whom were women. And just three of these women—Deborah Griscom Passmore, Amanda Almira Newton, and Mary Daisy Arnold—were responsible for half the collection. Since their original appearance in USDA bulletins and annual reports, their work had largely remained unobserved. Now it has been brought back into the light for a new audience by Higgin’s Twitter account and a new book published by Atelier Éditions, “An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts.”
“These U.S. Agriculture Department paintings of fruits and nuts are actually stunning,” headlined the Washington Post review of the book, suggesting the surprising detail and beauty viewers today might find in these illustrations of otherwise mundane subjects. This sense of surprise hints at the complicated intersection at which we find these watercolors. It highlights the imperative role of illustration—and the illustrator—at a time when photography was blossoming and amidst the development of other artistic technologies across history. It also highlights the question, both past and present, of whether botanical illustrations are scientific—or artistic—enough.
Garcinia mangostana, Deborah Griscom, 10-01-1909. U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Rare and Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD 20705
Once used to support horticulturists’ claims of ownership and now at the fingertips of anyone with an internet connection, the Pomological Watercolor Collection calls attention to centuries’ worth of debates over creation and ownership—both scientific and artistic—even when it comes to something as seemingly simple as fruit.
In the 1880s and 90s, horticulturists were increasingly concerned with ideas of intellectual property for “originators” of new varieties. Liberty Hyde Bailey, Cornell professor and cofounder of the American Society for Horticultural Science, proposed in 1891 that these plant originators obtain registration certificates through the USDA, so the public could then buy only from certified originators. The issue of trademarks, however, remained complicated both by the variable offspring of sexually-reproducing plants and the happenstance discovery—rather than development—of asexually-reproducing plants. In 1906, the National Committee on Plant Patents was formed under the American Association of Nurserymen, and in 1930 the Plant Patent Act was authorized. This was the first statute in the world that extended patent coverage to living organisms, which led to the 1980 Supreme Court ruling that “whether an innovation is alive or not is irrelevant to its patentability.”
Botanical illustration had, to that point, been a socially acceptable way for women to participate in science, especially during the 18th and 19th centuries as scientific fields became more specialized. But the practice was undergoing many changes, and whether recognized or not, hundreds of women illustrators were central to creating a foundation for modern botanical illustration. In the 18th century especially, the confluence of new artistic technologies and new scientific forms of classification increased tension between prioritizing aesthetics and utility.
“For every painting that documents a fruit you might recognize, there are dozens for which there has never been another depiction.”
There is a balance here: Historically, “the illustration process follows the language of the scientist,” says Alice Tangerini, Staff Illustrator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in the Department of Botany. But the scientific illustrator also “has an eye for the aesthetics of botanical illustration,” where “attention to accuracy is important, but excellence of style and technique used is also primary for an illustration to endure as a work of art and science.”
Deborah Griscom Passmore painted more than 1,500 of the Pomological watercolors, amounting to a fifth of the collection. Born in Edgemont, Pennsylvania in 1840, she went on to train under Thomas and Edward Moran and others at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
In her fifties, Passmore moved to Washington, D.C. at the request of William Wilson Corcoran, founder of the eponymous art gallery, but he died before she could make use of this connection. Yet in an important turn of events in August of 1892, she was invited to join the Department of Agriculture—where she would work until her death—by George Marx, a physician, arachnologist, and illustrator who just three years prior had become chief of the new Department of Illustrations. She was quickly promoted to the Division of Pomology, and by the following year she had painted many of the USDA exhibitions for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
The USDA began to publish an annual volume of their best scientific papers as a yearbook in 1894. An assistant pomologist at the USDA, William A. Taylor began writing a section called Promising New Fruits in the 1901 edition, in which a dozen of Passmore’s illustrations of peaches, grapes, apples, pears, and oranges are featured, though only identifiable through her signature. Her work continued to accompany this column until her death in 1911. Edward Lee Greene, a botanist known for “Landmarks of Botanical History,” said at the time: “Never in any book did I see a plate that looked as if the original equaled these; I did not know that they could be painted with such perfection.”
Much less has been recorded about the second and third most prolific illustrators featured in this collection, Amanda Almira Newton and Mary Daisy Arnold, respectively. Newton produced 1,200 watercolors, in addition to more than 300 wax models of fruits. Her grandfather, Isaac Newton, was the first commissioner of the USDA, where she began working three years after Passmore began, and went on to work until 1928. She was the first to make wax models for the USDA, and in 1904, she displayed some of them at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, demonstrating how environmental conditions, cultivation practices, and storage conditions affected fruits and their keeping qualities.
Arnold painted 1,060 watercolors for the collection, working for the USDA between 1904 and 1940. Beyond her watercolors that remain and evidence of lantern slides she mounted and colored, it is hard to find more information about her life and work, but Arnold may have, in her own time, painted in oils. Passmore also painted lilies and shells for pleasure, and while they were equally botanically accurate, reflect a creative freedom that was not possible in her pomological illustrations. These women were artists, but their illustrations served a scientific—and cultural—purpose.
Vitis, Amanda Almira Newton, 01-01-1920. U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Rare and Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD 20705
This technology of botanical illustration was changing, competing with photography and other new documentary mediums. But as Tangerini and many other contemporaries argue, the illustrator is not simply an outgrown technology but someone who has always communicated both with the science and with the viewer, scientist and public alike.
Other projects, like Watercolour World, also seek to digitize and make publicly available illustrations because they are “becoming increasingly important to scientists and historians as ice-caps melt, historical sites are bombed or vandalized, and flora and fauna disappear.” For every painting that documents a fruit you might recognize, there are dozens for which there has never been another depiction.
In its digital iteration, the Pomological Watercolor Collection is fun to explore, full of weird fruits that have not been grown in decades, full of a diversity we’re more conscious than ever of losing. But it also tells a story about a moment in time where the history of American fruit cultivation and changing technologies of botanical illustration and documentation collided. This was a pivotal time for American art, botany, and agriculture, and the work of a handful of highly skilled and prolific women is resurfacing to tell that story.
Further Reading
The Heritage of Original Art and Photo Imaging in USDA: Past, Present and Future, Alan Fusonie, 1990
Image credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Rare and Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD 20705
