Customer Reviews

Margaret Mee's Amazon: The Diaries of an Artist Explorer

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At once an art, adventure, and biography, MARGARET MEE'S AMAZON: DIARIES OF AN ARTIST EXPLORER is profiled here for its simply gorgeous pages packed with botanical illustration and photos. Unlike most illustration titles, however, MARGARET MEE'S AMAZON isn't just a photo or illustration catalog, but an in-depth survey blending her amazing drawings with accounts of her thirty-two years of expeditions into the Amazon rainforest. Her first expedition to Amazonas was in 1956, where she began the diaries and sketchbooks which comprise this title. From vivid accounts of plant-collecting expeditions to the exhibition of her paintings at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew (who work with Antique Collector's Club in producing this title, this is a definitive, outstanding piece holding wide-ranging interest and recommendation from art library holdings to botany collections, natural history holdings, and even the general-interest public library collection.

Passionately written and superbly illustrated; a must have for the tropical afficionado's library and the tropical gardener and botanist

Margaret Mee was an amazing woman and her work is exquisite. This book is perfect because it shows a great part of Mee's work in Amazon in her own words, with beautiful illustrations and photographs. It's a book to look and read all the time.

I have read another book by Margaret Mee and must confess to being fascinated by her life story. Her life was one of which most of us will only glimpse from our armchairs. But most wonderful of all are her beautiful botanical drawings. This book provides a real gateway into another world.

This book is an impressive description of an artist's best: her watercolor descriptions of the Amazon flowers. Nobody has done it better. It describes her trips through years and Amazon rivers as well as her determination in painting the moonflower, which is beautifully printed in the last pages fo the book. You can think that she has lived to find this flower. It is sad to see that after so many adventures in the jungle, she died so stupidly in London.