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Early New Zealand Botanical Art
VIII — Fanny Osborne of Great Barrier Island
VIII
Fanny Osborne of Great Barrier Island
Fanny Osborne (1852-1933) was born in Auckland, the second of thirteen children of Neill and Emilie Malcolm. She spent most of her life on Great Barrier Island and, like her mother, had thirteen children, all born on the island without medical aid. Her husband, Alfred, who was educated in Leeds and studied music and languages for four years in Germany, became interested in the plants of Great Barrier Island. He encouraged Fanny, who had been painting since a child, to illustrate the specimens he collected. Most of her paintings were done in the early 1900s, by which time her children had all been born. Early in the century she was selling sets of paintings of the native flowers of Great Barrier Island. One of her paintings appeared as a colour supplement to Brett's Christmas Annual (1913), but this enlarged, over-coloured reproduction did not do justice to the original painting. Fanny's five daughters painted plants too. The eldest, Lilian, married Thomas Gibbard, a tutor employed by the Osbornes, and moved to England. There she painted ornamentals, wildflowers and fungi until she was well into her nineties and won several awards for them from the Royal Horticultural Society.
This section on Fanny Osborne has been kept brief because a recent book has been devoted to her life and paintings. Fanny Osborne's Flower Paintings by Jeanne H. Goulding (1983) contains colour reproductions of forty-eight of her flower paintings as well as a vivid account of the lives of the Malcolms and Osbornes.
Fanny Osborne's paintings have a delicate softness somewhat reminiscent of the paintings of Emily Harris. They are accurate, though lacking in the finest detail. She used colour very carefully, but unfortunately the colours in some of her paintings have faded with time.