The Department of Botany of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History has created a database of the more than 3000 botanical illustrations curated by the department's scientific illustrator, Alice Tangerini. As part of a long-term project to make an on-line illustrated catalog of these illustrations available for our staff and others needing access to this information, we are pleased to offer 500 images in the three families that have been completed: Bromeliaceae, Cactaceae, and Melastomataceae. It is our hope that the scientific drawings included in this catalog will contribute to the understanding and appreciation of the plant species illustrated. Images in this catalog are copyrighted © by the Smithsonian Institution. The project was supported by a grant from the Atherton Seidell Endowment Fund of the Smithsonian Institution.

Brief biographical sketches have been prepared for each of the illustrators whose work is represented in the Catalog. These documents are being made available for personal use. The text is copyrighted © by the Smithsonian Institution. For permission to republish this material, contact the author, Larry Dorr. This publication may be cited as Smithsonian Catalog of Botanical Illustrations.

The catalog is searched by selecting a plant family from the list to the left. Only in the Melastomataceae has the nomenclature been updated. Otherwise, taxa are found under the name used in the original publication. Biographical information about the artists is also available.

The images of black and white line drawings are 480 pixels high and range in size from 15 to 40 KB. Images of the color plates are 30-60 KB. The images were optimized for viewing on a monitor and are not easily resized or printed. If you wish to reproduce these images for anything other than personal use or study, please contact Alice Tangerini for permission. For non-commercial, scientific, educational and personal use, please see our image use policy.

The long term goal of this project is to make a catalog of all of the scientific illustrations archived by the Department of Botany of the Smithsonian Institution available to our own researchers and colleagues around the world. The World Wide Web offers an ideal platform to accomplish this goal. As time and resources permit, we will add illustrations of additional plant families, update the nomenclature, and add synonymy to make the taxa illustrated more accessible.

We thank Vicki Wilson for scanning the 288 images of Cactaceae while volunteering at the Smithsonian Institution in 1994/1995.

First published in 1995. Presentation format updated in October 2004.

Artists Represented in the Smithsonian Catalog of Botanical Illustrations

Brief biographical sketches have been prepared for each of the illustrators whose work is represented in the Catalog. These documents are being made available for personal use. The text is copyrighted © by the Smithsonian Institution. For permission to republish this material, contact the author, Larry Dorr. This publication may be cited as Smithsonian Catalog of Botanical Illustrations.

Peggy-Ann Kessler Duke

Mary Emily Eaton

Regina Hughes

Louis Charles Christopher Krieger

Margaret Ursula Mee (née Brown)

Kako Morita

Deborah Griscom Passmore

Harold Ernest Robinson

Marie L. Solt

Alice R. Tangerini

Helen Adelaide Wood

This project was developed by:

Larry Dorr (Research Botanist)
Ellen Farr (Web Site Developer)
Alice Tangerini (Illustrator)