The Forest Came to the Verandah

At JambusanJambusan area, Sarawak, Malaysia×A former mining area near Bau in Sarawak, on Malaysian Borneo. North painted her pitcher plants at Jambusan in 1876.Open in Google Maps ↗ in Sarawak, in 1876, Marianne North hung yards of trailing pitcher plants around a balcony. Their swollen cups were blotched with crimson. She wanted to paint the largest, but had very little paper left.

Five years later, an account in The Gardeners’ Chronicle quoted her complaint: she had only “one small half-sheet of paper” on which to paint them. The resulting picture gives two immense pitchers almost the entire height of the composition. Their fluted red rims open towards the viewer; beyond them, limestone hills recede into blue.

A room beside the garden

North had been travelling for several years by the time she reached Borneo. Born in Hastings, on England’s south coast, in 1830, she belonged to a wealthy family and had spent much of her earlier life with her father. They travelled together and tended an ambitious garden. In 1867 he built three glasshouses, with different conditions for orchids, temperate plants, vines and cuttings. While he read and smoked among the plants, she washed ailing specimens and potted seedlings.

His death in 1869 broke up that life. She left the Hastings house, and in 1871 crossed the Atlantic. She already had a particular ambition: to paint tropical vegetation where it grew. Her travels took her through North America, Jamaica and Brazil, then towards Asia. Money bought the time to work; introductions opened houses in which she could stay long enough to use it.

At Kuching, a letter brought her ashore.

The Jervois household in Singapore had given her introductions to Charles Brooke, the ruler of Sarawak on Borneo’s north-western coast, and his wife Margaret. Charles was away when she arrived. Margaret, the Ranee, welcomed her into the Astana, their residence beside the river. North’s room had a back staircase into the garden, convenient when she wanted flowers or wanted to escape.

Margaret Brooke later remembered taking her own work into North’s room and sitting with her while she painted. Plants arrived morning and evening, brought by boatmen sent to collect them. North could work through the hottest part of the day and go out on the river towards evening. Her hostess arranged excursions around the painting.

Brooke’s own account, published in 1913, supplies a name absent from many versions of North’s story. When North asked about pitcher plants, Brooke said she did not think there were any in the country. They consulted Kong Kong, a Malay boatman who had long served the rajah. He knew where to find them.

He guided both women across the river, along the Rock Road and over logs laid across marshy ground. In a clearing they found pitchers of different shapes hanging and trailing over the vegetation. This was a separate outing from the later collection at Jambusan: Brooke did not identify these plants as the species that would be named for North.

The friendship did not make the women agree about everyone around them. Brooke recalled being unable to dislodge North’s contemptuous view of Dayak and Kayan people. The traveller who delighted in plants and enjoyed meeting Malay women could be dismissive of other people whose country she was crossing. Brooke’s affectionate account preserves that disagreement alongside the hospitality.

Until the bread turned blue

When official visitors needed the Astana’s spare rooms, North proposed moving to the rajah’s mountain farm at Matang. He lent her a cook, a soldier and a boy, supplied bread and a coop of chickens, and sent the party by canoe through canals and forest. After landing, they climbed to the cleared ground around the chalet.

The clearing was full of stumps and fallen trees, with coloured foliage spreading over them. Beyond lay the great swamp and, farther away, the sea. North painted a group of tree ferns around the little spring supplying the house with water. She stayed until the chickens had been eaten and the bread had turned blue.

On the return journey, she preferred her canoe to a covered boat that would hide the view. Collecting followed. Boys climbed into branches; the soldier’s sword cut through them; tangled masses of orchids and other plants fell into the water, nearly swamping the little vessel. The party carried the greenery back to hang in the rajah’s garden.

North recognised the difficulty afterwards. A plant suspended over swamp water had been moved to a dry tree above a mown lawn. She feared that few of her treasures survived. Painting plants in their surroundings did not mean that she always left them there.

Working from the verandah

Her next inland journey followed the Borneo Company’s mining routes. A steam-launch, a springless tram-cart, a pony and local carriers took her towards Tegora, where mercury was being extracted from the hill. She admired the forest and regretted seeing the mountain blasted apart. The mine also provided accommodation and access.

From the bungalow she could work in the forest or on the verandah, painting plants brought within reach. A creeper with pink berries and a brilliant scarlet seed case particularly interested her. Later, at Jambusan, another mining settlement, Everett brought down the trailing pitcher plants.

Paper made an oil painting portable.

The main body of North’s collection was painted in oils on prepared paper. A pale ground separated the paint from the paper beneath it. During the modern conservation project, samples from forty-three works generally revealed only one or two paint layers. In places, wet colour had been worked into wet colour; infrared examination also found preliminary drawing and revisions below the surface.

Her recurring pigments included cobalt blue, lead white and madder red. She used relatively little black, often modifying strong colours with blue, green or orange instead. A restricted palette reduced the materials a travelling painter needed to carry. It could also supply the intense colour that survives in the red rims of the pitchers and the blue distance behind them.

The picture was a composed account, rather than an automatic record of everything growing together in front of her. North could study a cut stem at close quarters and place it against a landscape she knew. The plant’s form, the setting and the arrangement on paper each involved a decision.

Our fullest account of those working days comes from her later autobiography, written after her travels and published after her death. Her sister edited it, and Kew’s botanist William Botting Hemsley corrected botanical material. The remembered journeys are North’s testimony; the surviving paintings preserve other evidence, including the changes beneath their finished surfaces.

Making a country fit the wall

By 1879 North wanted a public home for the growing collection. A newspaper had suggested Kew, the botanic gardens outside London. After missing a train at Shrewsbury and finding herself with time to spare, she wrote to Hooker, Kew’s director, offering the pictures and a building to contain them.

She wanted somewhere visitors could rest and obtain tea or coffee. Hooker accepted the gallery proposal but rejected the refreshments: the numbers arriving on a public holiday made the prospect impractical. North chose a site away from the usual entrances, where people who had walked through the gardens might need shelter.

James Fergusson, an architectural historian and her friend, designed and managed the building. North paid for it. Then she spent a year fitting, framing, patching and sorting her pictures. The gallery opened on 7 June 1882, but the arrangement was not finished for good. More journeys brought more paintings; after returning in 1885 she spent another year rearranging and renumbering them to keep the countries together.

She wrote catalogue information on cards beneath the pictures. Hemsley corrected it, added more, and eventually took responsibility for the published catalogue. Along the lower walls, samples of woods supplied another encounter with the plants she had visited. Above them, pictures crowded together geographically: a plant close enough to examine, then a forest, a river or a mountain.

A closer look · 3:50 · English

Inside North’s gallery

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North died in 1890. A plant in one of her Sarawak pictures would receive a botanical name more than a century later.

In 2021 Tian Yi Yu, Ian Turner and Martin Cheek published a revision of Borneo’s Chassalia, shrubs in the coffee family. They identified the plant in North’s Matang composition with a species they were describing, Chassalia northiana. Their evidence included specimens gathered by Ilias Paie in 1973 and by Bernard Lee Meng Hock in 1987. The latter gathering supplied the type specimen anchoring the new name. North’s painted berries had been in the collection since 1876.