Flora Indica, Kew Exhibition Promotional Price

Author: H.J. Noltie, 192 pages, 214 x 254 mm. Hardback, ISBN 9781842468425, Kew Publishing, 2025.

For the first time, Kew’s recovered collections of Indian botanical art are brought together with the remarkable stories that they tell – of the artists who painted them, the colonial context in which they were made, and their essential role in the development of botanical knowledge. This beautifully illustrated book foregrounds the vital role of Indian artists in helping to advance both scientific knowledge and the aesthetics of botanical art, featuring more than 100 artworks.

Flora Indica presents a representative selection from the previously fractured, uncatalogued, and largely inaccessible collection of over 7,000 Indian illustrations in Kew’s archives. The botanical watercolours, created between 1790 and 1850, were commissioned by British botanists, many of whom were employed by the East India Company to document India’s rich plant diversity.

The text by leading expert Henry Noltie reveals the lost stories of how these illustrations came to be, exploring the work of 20 Indian artists from 11 collections, with 19 named individuals and 30 previously unseen illustrations. Noltie’s extensive research into these hidden histories features plants native to South Asia alongside exotics introduced from the then-emerging international network of botanical gardens, taking readers on a journey which explores the environments in which these master artists worked. The style of works represents a unique fusion of traditional Indian artistry and techniques with botanists’ demands for naturalism and scientific specificity from an Indo-British perspective.

Flora Indica illuminates Kew’s beautiful Indian botanical art collection, through which readers are invited to discover the important lost histories of Indian botanical art from the age of empire.

An art historical triumph, a complete reimagining of the world of the artists: the world they came from, the often oppressive structures they lived in, the extraordinary work they produced, and their remarkable legacy, bringing together a variety of different Indian traditions of draughtsmanship and artistic creativity, but brought into the service of Enlightenment-era European science.

William Dalrymple, historian

Author Information

For 30 years Henry Noltie worked at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh as a taxonomist, curator and historian of its Indian collections, especially the botanical drawings made by Indian artists for Scottish East India Company surgeons. He is a Research Associate of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and the Natural History Museum, London.