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Fearless World Traveler by Laurie Lawlor5/30/2023 Exemplary end matter expands on the importance of North’s work and its Kew Gardens home, comments on the editing of North’s biography, and includes source notes and a who’s who list of luminaries in North’s social circle. Stadtlander’s mixed-media paintings strike a similar balance between travels and nature study, and her double-page spread of a Kew gallery affords her young audience a glimpse at how museumgoers experience North’s work in her own time and today. Lawlor follows not only North’s adventuring but also her innovative approach to nature painting, which celebrated the riotous colors of her specimens and captured them in their natural context, with attention to atmosphere and well as solid surroundings. She upended expectations for a genteel lady as she documented flora and fauna heretofore unseen by most of her countrymen and assured her own legacy by bequeathing her paintings to Kew Gardens, housed in a building she also commissioned and donated. With financial security and fortunate connections (naturalists Joseph Hooker and Charles Darwin could be called upon for advice), she embarked upon a series of global journeys. Fearless World Traveler: Adventures of Marianne North. Laurie Lawlor deftly chronicles North’s life, from her restrictive childhood to her wild world travels to the opening of the Marianne North Gallery at Kew Gardens to her death in 1890. The death of Marianne North’s father relieved the nineteenth-century British woman of responsibility as the family’s spinster caregiver and freed her to pursue the passions she had privately cultivated over four decades: nature and art. The legendary Charles Darwin was among her many supporters.
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