Margaret Warriner Buck

Margaret Warriner Buck (April 29, 1857 - April 5, 1929) was a botanical artist known as a specialist in depicting California wildflowers.

Rein-orchis (Habenaria elegans), from a drawing by Margaret Warriner Buck for The Wild Flowers of California
Ladies' Tresses or Spiranthes Romanzoffianum (now Spiranthes romanzoffiana), from a drawing by Margaret Warriner Buck for The Wild Flowers of California

Biography

Buck was born Margaret Warriner in New York, New York, in 1857.[1] She studied art at Yale Art School before moving to San Francisco in 1891. She gained a reputation as a botanical artist and specialist in depicting California wildflowers.[2] In the 1890s, she and writer Mary Elizabeth Parsons hiked around California with an eye to publishing a book about California flora. The result was the very successful The Wild Flowers of California: Their Names, Haunts, and Habits (1897), written by Parsons with over 100 illustrations engraved from Buck's pen-and-ink drawings.[3][4] It went through many printings and several editions and was still being reprinted into the 1950s.[5][6]

After the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, she worked for Sunset magazine.[2] She died in San Rafael, California, in 1929.[7]

References
  1. Dawdy, Doris Ostrander. Artists of the American West: a biographical dictionary, vol. 3. Sage Books, 1974.
  2. Landauer, Susan, William H. Gerdts, and Patricia Trenton. The Not-So-Still Life: A Century of California Painting and Sculpture. University of California Press, 2003, p. 206.
  3. Hughes, Edan Milton. Artists in California (1786-1940), vol. 2. San Francisco: Hughes, 1989.
  4. "With Western Writers". Sunset 18 (November 1906 – April 1907), p. 592.
  5. "Pioneer Wildflower Book on California Reprinted." Desert Magazine, April 1957, pp. 42-43.
  6. Sands, Diane T. "An Explosive Botanical Smackdown". California Academy of Sciences website, 2013.
  7. Marin Journal, April 11, 1929. (Obituary)


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