Leaves from a Beautiful Life: Indian Travels and Paintings of Marianne North: 1877-79

Contents: Preface. Section I: Marianne North: A Beautiful Life. 1. A Brush with the World. 2. The Indian Sojourn. 3. The Living Gallery at Kew. 4. In Full Bloom: An Enduring Legacy. Suggested Reading. Section II: Beneath the Banyan: Echoes from India. (Selections from Marianne North’s Indian travels, as recorded in her autobiography, Recollections of a Beautiful Life). 1. India: 1877-79. 2. Hill Places in India: 1878. 3. Rajputana: 1878. Section III: Under Indian Skies: A Painted Journey (A Selection of Marianne North’s Paintings in India). List of Paintings. Paintings.

Step into the vibrant landscapes of 19th-century India through the eyes of one of the Victorian era's most extraordinary women. Leaves from a Beautiful Life traces the remarkable journey of Marianne North – a fearless botanical painter whose solo travels across India in the 1870s produced some of the most vivid and enduring images of the subcontinent's natural and cultural beauty.

From the foothills of the Himalayas to the temples of the South, Marianne painted what she saw with unsparing detail and passionate curiosity – towering trees, rare flowers, bustling bazaars, sacred shrines, and majestic architecture. Her paintings, created in oil rather than the typical watercolour, broke convention and captured India's life and landscape with uncommon immediacy.

Drawing from her journals, letters, and paintings, this book offers a rich portrait of an artist in motion – defying expectations, chronicling the vanishing wild, and recording an India at once ancient and ever-changing.

Part art book, part travelogue, and part biography, Leaves from a Beautiful Life invites readers into the living world of a pioneering woman whose legacy still blooms in the galleries of Kew Gardens and the pages of botanical history.