Paper Gardens: The Lives of Botanical Illustrations in India
Holly Shaffer
Holly Shaffer is an Associate Professor in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Brown University. She specialises in eighteenth– and nineteenth-century South Asian and British art, and their intersections through empire. Her first book, Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760–1910 (2022), won an American Institute of Indian Studies Edward C Dimock prize and an Historians of British Art book award. Currently, she is co–curating an exhibition, Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750–1850, on view at the Yale Center for British Art in Spring 2026; it will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Yale University Press. She is also working on a book on food, art, and the cultivation of taste in northern India in the nineteenth century.
Henry J Noltie is a botanist, curator, and historian. Having worked at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh since 1986, he has had extraordinary access to the botanical illustrations held across major British institutions. He has meticulously identified, catalogued, and reordered long–forgotten or dispersed collections of drawings, manuscripts, and ephemera, inviting renewed scholarly and public attention to the visual culture of colonial science, particularly the sophisticated work of Indian artists employed by British botanists. In recontextualising these archives, Noltie moves beyond botany and into art history. His work recovers the names and contributions of artists, recognising individual styles, critiques anonymisation of their labour, and re-reads botanical illustration archives as a rich site for critical inquiry in how archives are formed.
Sumana Roy is the author of two works of non–fiction, How I Became a Tree (2017) and Provincials (2024); Plant Thinkers of Twentieth–Century Bengal (2024), a work of literary criticism; Missing: A Novel (2018); My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories (2019); and two collections of poems, Out of Syllabus (2019) and VIP: Very Important Plant (2022).
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