The name of Nelly Roberts should perhaps be better known amongst people interested in plants, but I think very few would know her story. Earlier this year the Garden Museum were delighted to use funding generated from our recently established endowment fund to purchase five paintings by her for the collection. The paintings were acquired following a suggestion from our Community Panel, with funds from Ever Green, our newly established Endowment Fund.
Born in Brixton in 1872, the daughter of a watchmaker, Nelly lived above the family shop at 72 Loughborough Road. Just a short bus ride from the museum, in this modest flat Nelly would paint orchids for the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) for fifty six years. Living in a working class area of London Nelly didn’t train formally as an artist. She received lessons from Minnie Walters Anson and perhaps attended some evening classes at Lambeth School of Art and sometimes placed flower paintings in the window of her family shop.
Orchids had become immensely popular in Britain during the Victorian era, when native orchids were recorded and published and tropical epiphytic orchids that had evolved in natural habitats to live on rocks and trees were imported from across the Empire. Developments in hybridizing techniques in the mid-nineteenth century saw thousands of new hybrids being grown and commercially produced. The RHS’s first garden in Chiswick which opened in 1822 was famed for its orchid displays.
Orchids had been shown and judged at the RHS’s flower shows from the very first shows that took place at Chiswick in the 1820s. When the shows moved to Temple Gardens in 1889 the RHS formed its Orchid Committee and judging criteria were formalized and recorded, they developed an agreed standard for recording and registering new hybrids. With so many new orchids being bred there did, however, continue to be confusion between new hybrids. With so many specimens being awarded prizes the committee formally requested that artists be employed to record the prize-winning orchids, recording for posterity their size, colour and characteristics.
Nelly started painting orchids for a Camberwell based orchid breeder Mr R I Measures. She was introduced to the orchid community by Mr Measures and his head gardener Henry Chapman. Chapman had joined the Orchid Committee in 1894 and it is likely that he put Nelly’s name forward to the committee as an artist.
In 1897 at the age of just twenty four Nelly Roberts was taken on for a six month trial as the official orchid painter at the RHS. According to The Orchid Review which published an article about her she was ‘Very shy & retiring,’ she painted in a ‘small, neat but rather cold room’, at home. Nelly became proficient in recording the complex forms, plant structure, patterns and markings of each individual variety.
After the death of her father Nelly’s mother continued to run the shop and Nelly continued to paint orchids for the RHS. She was paid a salary of £83.8 shillings, year but she would also take private commissions from breeders and nurseries who also wanted images of their orchids. Among the paintings purchased by the Garden Museum is Odontonia Olga ‘The Premier’ which was awarded a prize on the A.M. 14.1.1930, a watercolour of the same specimen was painted by Nelly Roberts for the RHS and forms part of their Orchid Award Portraits. A coloured haze can be seen around both examples. This technical device was used to highlight the pale elements of the specimen and give a sense of depth to the visual representation. Nelly Roberts would use a silhouette of the flower outline cut out from paper to blank out the board and the coloured haze was then applied using a spray. Once the background was in place the flower was painted in multiple layers of pigment. The Whatman artist board used offered a certain amount of rigidity to allow the pictures to be transported to the RHS or shown off by the owners of private commissions.
The collection of paintings includes Vuylstekeara Elatior, is an example of Vuylstekeara hybrid first created by Charles Vuylsteke in the early 1900s by crossing orchid genera, Odontoglossum, Cochlioda, and Miltonia. These hybrids are admired for their lovely, butterfly-shaped flowers that can last for several months. Eliator doesn’t appear to have gained an RHS award but Nelly’s painting suggests that it is a wonderful deep fuchsia pink with delicate white detailing.
In the painting of Cypripedium Ledouxiae, var. Sultan Roberts illustrates her ability to paint the subtle hues of this deep maroon slipper orchid that is veined with acidic green stripes. She depicts the pouch like labellum of the flower with great skill conveying a sense of depth and structure of the plants modified petal. The pouch traps insects, forcing them to pass over the staminode (sterile stamen) to escape, and thus facilitating pollination.
Nelly continued to work from home until she retired in 1953. She lived together with her younger sister Edith who is listed on some records as ‘incapacitated’, suggesting that she was unable to support herself and may have been disabled in some way. It is therefore likely that Nelly’s income as an orchid painter supported her and her sister Edith. Roberts worked at quite a pace producing on average a hundred orchid paintings a year for the RHS, completing in excess of 4,500 by the time she retired. It is estimated that she may have painted a total of 10,000 orchid paintings during her lifetime. The RHS awarded her a gold medal in recognition for her work and as an acknowledgement of her skill and contribution to the Society.
After Nelly retired in 1953 other artists were employed to carry on the archive of Orchid Award Portraits, indeed artist Deborah Lambkin is the incumbent orchid artist and has added at least a further five hundred paintings to the collection. The collection forms the largest collection of continually commissioned artwork held by the RHS, comprising of over 7,000 works. With some varieties of orchid no longer in cultivation the paintings are the only visual representation of some of them.
Despite her achievements Nelly Roberts was buried in a communal grave after her death on 29 March 1959. She rests in grave No 262 D3 of Lambeth Cemetery in Blackshaw Road, Tooting. Nelly Roberts had been all but forgotten until avid social historian Tracey Gregory started carrying out research into people who lived on Loughborough Road close to her own home.
We hope that by adding these works to our collection Nelly Roberts will be more widely known and that her artistic skill appreciated by our visitors.