A Bluets Flower Gallery
It's extremely rare to find a painting of Quaker Ladies (Houstonia caerulea) in a museum. Perhaps, because they're so small and delicate, they've not been the subjects of artists other than botanical artists. They're a perennial species native to eastern Canada and the eastern United States, whose flowers are also called Azure Bluets, Little Blues, and Little Innocents.
Note: Though these paintings below show Bluets as blue flowers, they are often almost white with a hint of blue.
Houstonia Caerulea
Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708-1770), German
From a book which was a lithograph impression
Book source: Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, US
Georg Dionysius Ehret was a botanist and entomologist known for his botanical illustrations. His original art illustrations have sold for more than $43,000 USD. Ehret's originals may be found at the Natural History Museum in London, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, The Royal Society, London, the Lindley Library at the Royal Horticultural Society, the Victoria and Albert Museum, at the University Library of Erlangen, the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden, and the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The genus Ehretia (with about 50 species) was named in his honor. Read more about Ehret on Wiki HERE.
Quaker Lady (Houstonia caerulea)
Unknown Artist
Commercial color lithograph, 1.5" x 2.75" (w x h), 1890
from the Flowers series cards (i.e., "baseball cards")
for Old Judge Cigarettes issued by Goodwin & Company
Printer: George S. Harris & Sons (American, Philadelphia)
See all 50 flower cards in the MET collection HERE.
29 cent Bluets Stamp
Karen Mallory, American
Lithograph ink on paper
United States Postal Service
Issued July 24, 1992
Fifty colorful, blooming native plants dotted the philatelic landscape with the 29-cent Wildflowers commemorative stamps issued July 24, 1992, in Columbus, Ohio, host city for the AmeriFlora '92 International Floral and Garden Exposition. Fifty wildflowers for 50 states, though no state identification in this bouquet, the stamps were issued in panes of fifty different designs. Designed by Karen Mallary of Anacortes, Washington, the stamps were produced by Ashton-Potter America, Inc., in the offset lithography process.
Bluet
Artist Unknown
Art published in Wildflowers of Canada,
The Montreal Star, 1895
Bluets Pattern
Torey Wahlstrom, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Watercolor on paper
The artist has exhibited at North Carolina Botanical Garden,
Blowing Rock Art Museum, Spartanburg Art Museum,
and North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences
The artist's website is HERE.
Quakerladies (Houstonia caerulea)
Mary Vaux Walcott (1860-1940), American
Watercolor on paper, 7" x 10" (w x h), April 24, 1917
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of the artist
Smithsonian notes:
Also known as Mary Morris Vaux, Mary Morris Walcott, Mary Morris Vaux Walcott, and Mrs. Charles Doolittle Walcott, she was born in Philadelphia and died in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada. She painted in Washington, D.C. and British Columbia, Canada.
Mary Morris Vaux received a set of watercolor paints at age eight and began experimenting with painting flowers. After her mother's death when Mary was nineteen, she assumed the responsibility of looking after her two younger brothers and her father. The family spent summers in the Canadian Rockies, where Mary and her brothers studied mineralogy and recorded the flow of glaciers in drawings and photographs. After 1887, Mary returned to western Canada almost every summer with her brothers and became an active mountain climber, outdoorswoman, and photographer. One summer a botanist asked her to paint a rare blooming arnica; her success in recording the flower encouraged her to concentrate on botanical illustration. For many years Mary Vaux explored difficult terrain in the Canadian Rockies, looking for important flowering species to paint.
In 1913 she met Charles Doolittle Walcott, then secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, when he was conducting geological research. They were married a year later. Beginning the following summer, the couple spent from three to four months each season in the Canadian Rockies, where Dr. Walcott continued his geological and paleontological studies. During these summers Mary Vaux Walcott painted hundreds of watercolor studies of native flowers.
At the urging of botanists and wildflower enthusiasts, a selection of four hundred of her illustrations was published in 1925 by the Smithsonian Institution in a five-volume edition titled North American Wild Flowers. In 1935 she contributed the illustrations to the volume North American Pitcher Plants, also published by the Smithsonian.
Bluets
Kate Anderson, central Massachusetts
Acrylic, May 4, 2021
"Sketched some of the tiniest flowers
I could find." -Kate Anderson
The artist's web site is HERE.
Houstonia caerulea
Jennifer Steen Booher, Bar Harbor, Maine
Photograph, 18" x 22", 2020
Uprooted series, one of thirteen works
$300 USD
Jennifer Booher is an artist and photographer living in Bar Harbor, Maine. She received a BA in Art History and Asian Studies at Vassar College in 1989, and a master's degree in Landscape, and is a UMVA (Union of Maine Visual Artists) member. The artist's website is HERE.
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