Rory McEwen strummed his way onto the Ed Sullivan show, sat in on a sitar session with George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, and was a leader in the post-war folksong revival. Yet arguably his greatest legacy was not in the field of music a talented, precise artist, McEwen revolutionized the field of botanical art.
McEwen developed a distinctive style working on unadorned vellum, presenting botanical subject matter with scientific precision and artistic flair, without ever compromising one for the other. At a time when such paintings focused on perfect specimens, McEwen found beauty in...