Brigid EDWARDS
(London 1940)
Red Hot Pokers
Watercolour, over an underdrawing in pencil, on vellum.
Inscribed Red hot pokers, 1999. on the reverse of the panel.
534 x 405 mm. (21 x 17 3/4 in.)
Inscribed Red hot pokers, 1999. on the reverse of the panel.
534 x 405 mm. (21 x 17 3/4 in.)
Brigid Edwards almost always paints her watercolours on smooth, prepared vellum and, like many botanical artists, she works very slowly. As she has stated, ‘A large painting (and I mean volume and painted area as opposed to large but unpainted surface) can take up to twelve weeks to complete.’ Drawn in 1999, the present sheet depicts the species of flowering plants, native to South Africa, familiarly known as Red Hot Pokers (Kniphofia caulescens), with flowers that open as a deep coral-red and change to a light lemon-yellow between late summer and mid-autumn.
Born in London, the botanical artist Brigid Segrave Edwards studied illustration and graphic design at the Central School of Art in London and enjoyed a successful career as a television producer and director before turning to botanical illustration in the mid-1980s. She first exhibited her work at the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1990 – an unusual honour for a botanical artist - and has also had her work shown at the Linnean Society in London, the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation in Pittsburgh and the Kew Gardens Gallery, as well as at commercial galleries in London and New York. Early in her career as a botanical artist, Edwards was commissioned to paint 115 watercolours of species of primulas from life as illustrations for the book Primula by John Richards, published in 1993; the watercolours for the project were later exhibited at Kew Gardens. Edwards has won a number of gold medals for botanical illustration from the Royal Horticultural Society, and in 2005 her work was included in the exhibition A New Flowering: 1000 Years of Botanical Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. She also paints watercolours of insects (some of which were exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. in 2003) and takes black and white photographs of plant forms. In 2018 Edwards was commissioned to design a postage stamp as part of a series featuring endangered species for the United Nations, and also designed the cover for the novel El ala izquierda (The Left Wing) by the Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu. She lives and works in the town of St. Just in Cornwall. Watercolours by Edwards are today in the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation in Pittsburgh, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the Shirley Sherwood Collection of contemporary botanical art.
Provenance
Beadleston Gallery, New York.
