1. Marianne North was a prolific English Victorian biologist and botanical artist, notable for her plant and landscape paintings, her extensive foreign travels, her writings, her plant discoveries and the creation of her gallery at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Marianne North trained as a vocalist under Charlotte Helen Sainton-Dolby, but her voice failed, and she then devoted herself to painting flowers.
Marianne North began flower painting after the death of her mother in 1855.
Marianne North's father became ill in the Alps in 1869, and she brought him back to Hastings, where he died.
Marianne North continued to paint as a way to assuage her grief.
Marianne North was encouraged to visit South America by Frederic Edwin Church, whom she considered "the greatest of living landscape painters" and whose home in New York, Olana, she visited twice.
Marianne North spent all of 1878 in various parts of India.
On her return to Britain, Marianne North exhibited a number of her drawings in London.
Marianne North offered to give the collection to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and to erect a gallery to house them.
At Charles Darwin's suggestion, Marianne North went to Australia in 1880, and for a year painted there and in New Zealand.
Kew Gardens claims that the Marianne North Gallery is "the only permanent solo exhibition by a female artist in Britain".