Margaret Mee Margaret Ursula Brown was born in
Margaret Mee
Margaret Ursula Brown was born in Chesham on 22 nd May 1909. She attended Dr Challoner's Grammar School, Amersham, followed by The School of Art, Science and Commerce, Watford. After a short period of teaching in Liverpool she decided to travel abroad.
She married twice. Firstly to Reginald Bruce Bartlett in January 1936. The marriage to Bartlett was not happy and ended in divorce in 1943. She later married Greville Mee, who was also attending St. Martin's School of Art, in the late 1940 s.
After the war she studied art at St. Martin's School of Art, London. In 1950 she attended the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, where she learnt her style of illustration, and received a national diploma in painting and design.
She moved to Brazil with Greville Mee, in 1952 to teach art in the British school of São Paulo. Her first expedition was in 1956 to Belém in the Amazon Basin.
She then became a botanical artist for São Paulo's Instituto de Botanica in 1958, exploring the rainforest and more specifically Amazonas state from 1964, painting the plants she saw, some new to science.
She created 400 books of gouache (water colour) illustrations, 40 sketchbooks, and 15 diaries.
Mee travelled to Washington D. C. , USA in 1964 and briefly to England in 1968 for the exhibition and publication of her book, “ Flowers of the Brazilian Forests”.
In 1976 Margaret was awarded the MBE for services to Brazilian botany. She also received recognition in Brazil including an honorary citizenship of Rio in 1975.
Margaret died , aged 79, following a car accident, on 30 November 1988. In January 1989 a memorial to her life, botanical work and environmental campaigning took place Kew Gardens
In her honour, after her death the Margaret Mee Amazon Trust was founded to further education and research in Amazonian plant life and conservation.
“I know my death will not be the end of my work. Wherever I go I will try to influence those who are destroying our planet, so the earth will have a chance to survive” Margaret Mee in Brazil, 1988
- Slides: 12
