The Botanical Art of the Amazon Basin

Margaret Mee's celebrated paintings of Amazonian flora, created during her numerous expeditions to the Brazilian Amazon between the 1950s and 1988, have been published in several collected volumes including 'Flowers of the Amazon Forests.' The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew holds a significant collection of her original works. Some of her paintings are available as archival prints through Kew's shop and various fine-art botanical print publishers.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew maintains one of the world's most extensive collections of botanical illustrations, including many works documenting Amazonian biodiversity from historical expeditions. The Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi in Belém, Brazil, and the New York Botanical Garden also hold important collections of South American botanical art. These institutions continue to commission new illustrations as part of ongoing botanical survey work in the Amazon.

Unlike traditional botanical illustration that isolates a single specimen on a white background, Amazon-focused artists often depict entire ecological communities—showing epiphytes, lianas, and understory plants growing together as they do in the wild. This approach sacrifices some anatomical clarity for each individual species but communicates the overwhelming structural complexity of the rainforest canopy. Some illustrators work from photographs and field sketches because transporting fresh specimens from the deep Amazon to a studio is rarely practical.

Richard Spruce's botanical specimens and associated illustrations from his 14 years in the Amazon (1849–1864) are primarily archived at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where high-resolution digital scans are increasingly available through Kew's online catalog. Alfred Russel Wallace's sketches from his Amazon expedition (1848–1852) survived only partially due to the ship fire that destroyed most of his collections on the return voyage. Some reproductions appear in scholarly editions of Wallace's 'Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro' and in Kew's special collections.