The Kew Gardens Botanical Artist

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew houses the largest and most diverse botanical collections in the world. The illustration archives contain more than 170,000 prints and drawings of plants. It is one of London’s top tourist attractions and is a World Heritage Site.

Françoise Balsan graduated with a degree in Art History from the École du Louvre and the Sorbonne (Paris IV), and specialised in botanical watercolour. After first copying oil paintings, she switched to watercolour. Balsan considers Nicolas Robert, Claude Aubriet, Maria Sibylla Merian and Pierre-Joseph Redouté to be masters of the genre. With her academic background, Balsan researched the writings of Redouté’s students while studying his techniques. Thanks to her teaching experience, the techniques of early 19th-century watercolour painting have become accessible in this book. Balsan teaches in Paris and Saint Germain-en-Laye, and holds seminars in botanical watercolour painting in the Perche region of France.