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This luminous watercolor of Passiflora holosericea was painted in 1789 by Margaret Meen, a leading botanical artist of the late Georgian period, and one of the few women of her generation to work professionally at Kew. The drawing presents a single vine looping twice across the vellum, its thin green-turquoise stem forming shallow coils that carry the eye across the page. Three blossoms punctuate the top arc, framed by stipules and the species’ distinctive three-lobed, softly felted leaves.
The plant is labeled in Meen’s formal italic: Passiflora holosericea below center, and the Linnaean class and order Gynandria Pentandria (five stamens united by a single pistil) at lower right. These inscriptions reflect Meen’s standard practice during her years of work at the Royal Gardens, Kew, where she was granted access to newly introduced specimens and was commissioned to record them in a high-finish format suitable for engraving. The species depicted here had only recently reached cultivation in Britain, having been introduced from Central and Northern South America. By 1788 it was flowering in the hothouses at Kew and Chelsea, prized for its compact growth, velvety foliage, and striking corona filaments, which deepen from pale violet to crimson near the base. Meen’s watercolor is one of the earliest known visual records of the species made in England.
The composition is remarkable for its restraint and clarity. Every element - the lean stem, coiling tendrils, simplified leaf posture, and luminous blossoms - is selected to show structure without redundancy. This balancing of scientific legibility and natural grace was characteristic of Meen’s mature style. While she had begun her career exhibiting flower pieces at the Royal Academy in the 1770s, by the late 1780s she had become a fixture at Kew, working independently and also training elite pupils, including Queen Charlotte and the Princesses at Windsor.
The sheet belongs to a group of at least five passion-flower studies Meen produced around this time, signed in the same way and rendered on vellum. Others in the series include Passiflora vespertilio, maliformis, misera, and laurifolia, now preserved in the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society. These works were possibly intended as part of a larger publishing effort, announced in 1790 under the title Exotic Plants from the Royal Gardens at Kew. Although only one installment of the series was engraved and distributed, Meen continued to prepare the drawings, which remained in her possession until they were rediscovered and acquired by the collector and horticultural patron Reginald Cory in the early twentieth century.
In this watercolor, the plant’s habit has been elegantly choreographed across the support. Its curving geometry, sparse layout, and subtle color echo the highest traditions of eighteenth-century botanical painting. Yet the drawing also serves a practical function: it provides a near-taxonomic diagram of a new species at the moment of its arrival in Europe, rendered with scientific fidelity and poetic restraint. As with the finest work of her contemporaries, including Bauer and Ehret, Meen’s achievement lies in her ability to make an unfamiliar plant newly legible to the European eye.
Today, Meen is recognized as a central figure in the professionalization of women’s botanical illustration in Britain. This watercolor, dating from her most active period at Kew, stands among the finest surviving examples of her work.
