Pandora’s Paintbox

Pandora Sellars – Blue Water Lily, 1995, (Shirley Sherwood Collection)

Scanning the paintings in Max’s magnificent morning room, Detective Inspector Henry Monk spots an incredible botanical watercolour…

A watercolour painting of a flower may not sound the most eye catching of artworks, but only if you have not had the opportunity to get close to an original Pandora Sellars painting.

Born in 1936 “Paddy”, as Sellars was known to family and friends, developed a life long love of nature growing up in rural Hereford. Although she trained as an artist at both Hereford and Cheltenham Schools of Art incredibly she had no formal education in botanical illustration.

When Sellars discovered she was unable to capture the subtle colours of her husbands orchid collection using photography, she turned to her paintbox. This fascination with colour, and capturing the intricacy of floral shades and tones, is clear in her exquisite paintings. She first exhibited her work at the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) in the 1970’s and had a long lasting relationship producing illustrations for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, an academic journal for plant ecologists, botanists and horticulturalists.

Retiring to Hereford in her eighties, Sellars sadly passed away in 2017, but she leaves behind a body of work which holds six silver medals and one gold medal from the RHS. In 1987 she was commissioned by HRH The Prince of Wales, now King Charles, who is himself an accomplished watercolourist.

Considered “one of the top botanical painters of all time” – Botanical Art and Artists – Sellars is remembered as charming, funny, cheerful and modest. I think this is reflected in her work, there is a sense of lightness and elegance in her watercolours, they entrance and capture the imagination.

As part of this year’s Coronation celebrations over forty of the King’s works will be on exhibition at Sandringham from April to October. The works feature British landscapes and Royal Residences.

His Majesty The King wrote in 1991 for the book ‘HRH The Prince of Wales Watercolours’,

“I took up painting entirely because I found photography less than satisfying. Quite simply, I experienced an overwhelming urge to express what I saw through the medium of watercolour and to convey that almost ‘inner’ sense of texture which is impossible to achieve via photography…”

Clearly His Majesty and Pandora Sellars shared the knowledge known to all artists seeking to capture images of nature, that photography tells one story, but watercolour’s unique properties provide a emotional, almost visceral means of recording the elusive beauty of the natural world.

Pandora Sellars – Laelia tenebrosa hybrid, 1989, (Shirley Sherwood collection)

The painting above and Blue Waterlily (which I have gifted to Max in my novel, Finding Vincent) are both part of the Shirley Sherwood collection. Dr Sherwood, who studied Botany at Oxford and was part of the team to discover the indigestion drug, Tagamet, began collecting botanical art in 1990. Her collection now holds over 1,000 artworks from 36 countries. The collection is housed in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery in Kew which holds exhibitions throughout the year.

Sellars worked on hot press watercolour paper. Widely used for illustration, hot press paper provides a smooth, regular surface which is perfect for highly detailed botanical and portrait work.

Her legacy is a body of work that is scientifically accurate, complex in terms of its representation of plants and also the compositions she chose to best showcase each species. Her meticulous detail, including passages of exceptional “negative painting” – where the white of the paper or a lighter tone is painted around with darker pigment to create a fine detail, such as hairs or tiny filaments and anthers – alongside cleverly applied contrast, make her work three dimensional and exceptionally life like.

Her illustrations can be found in the following books.

Contemporary Botanical Artists, The Shirley Sherwood Collection

The Flora of Jersey, Frances Le Sueur

The genus Paphiopedilum, Phillip Cribb

Now it’s time for me to brave the March wind in the Lake District and sketch a golden daffodil.