Events at Kew and Wakehurst Place

The Shirley Sherwood gallery

The Shirley Sherwood gallery of Botanical Art opened at Kew Gardens in Spring 2008. It is be the first gallery in the world dedicated to botanical art and open to the public all year round.The gallery will exhibit precious works of art from Kew’s and Dr Shirley Sherwood’s collections, many of which have never been on public display before.

Kew holds one of the world’s greatest collections of botanical art, totalling over 200,000 items, including works by masters of botanical art such as G.D. Ehret, the Bauer Brothers and Redouté, together with nineteenth century artists such as Walter Hood Fitch. The new gallery will provide state-of-the-art climatic control allowing many of the works to be displayed in the public for the first time.

Dr Shirley Sherwood holds one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of original, contemporary botanical art from over 200 artists. It documents the emergence of a new wave of botanical painters and the renaissance of their art form and is arguably the most important private collection of twentieth century botanical art in the world. These works complement Kew’s own collection which has a rich heritage of eighteenth and nineteenth century illustrations.The new building will be linked with the nearby Marianne North Gallery, a permanent display of Victorian botanical and landscape paintings. The Link Gallery between the two buildings will always have a selection of contemporary works from the Shirley Sherwood Collection.

The Gallery will host three exhibitions a year and the inaugural exhibition which ran from April - October 2008, combined some of the highlights of the two collections, providing an overview of the most significant artists from c1700 through to contemporary artists.