One of the most revered botanical artists of the twentieth century; Rory McEwen was born in Marchmont House, Berwickshire. The son of Sir John Helias Finnie McEwen and Lady Bridget Mary McEwen, he began painting flowers at the age of eight, but first pursued a degree in English at Trinity College Cambridge. While there McEwen became involved in the Cambridge Footlights, writing and performing in their 1955 production at the Scala Theatre, London. In 1956 he travelled with his brother to the US, pursuing a fascination with blues music, and by the following year he had achieved some fame as a folk singer, appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show in America and the BBC’s Tonight in the UK. Between 1959 and 1963 he presented and performed in his own television show, Hullabaloo, before devoting himself exclusively to visual art from 1964. Ever versatile, McEwen experimented with Modernism, producing abstracts in oil and Perspex sculptures, but primarily painted exquisitely detailed individual flowers or vegetables. Alongside these works, in the 1970s he also produced looser, more impressionistic depictions of vetches and grasses, such as the present example. This painting forms part of a series of over 30 watercolours created in September 1977 which obsessively explore the same vegetation from differing angles, echoing the fascination with series and repetitions of his artistic contemporaries, such as David Hockney.

In addition to many solo exhibitions in Edinburgh, London, and New York during his lifetime, Rory McEwen was the subject of two major retrospectives at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 1988, and at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art at Kew Gardens, London, in 2013.