HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Art Exhibition at Schlesinger Library will Feature Botanical Paintings by Esther Heins

A retrospective exhibition of the botanical paintings of Esther Heins is currently showing at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College and will run through Jan. 4, 1999. The one-woman show is titled "Of Glory in the Flower - The Botanical Art of Esther Heins."

Heins, who celebrates her 90th birthday with this exhibition, is still actively painting and exhibiting. A watercolor painted when she was 89, the Crimson-veined Prayer Plant, appeared on the cover of the December 1997 Journal of the American Medical Association.

For 40 years, Heins has worked exclusively in the field of botanical art, specializing in full-scale watercolors of flowering trees and shrubs, many from the living collections of the Arnold Arboretum. A book of her watercolors, Flowering Trees and Shrubs: The Botanical Art of Esther Heins, was published in 1987.

Heins' work has been featured in numerous international and traveling exhibitions. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Hunt Institute for Botanical Art in Pittsburgh, the Arnold Arboretum, and many private collections across the country.

In the tradition of the craft of natural science illustrations, her watercolors - the actual size of the plants - are recognized as not only botanically accurate but also as works of art.

Born in Brooklyn on Nov. 10, 1908, Heins is a longtime Massachusetts resident, living and painting in the same house in Marblehead since 1952. She attended the Massachusetts School of Art (now the Massachusetts College of Art), where she studied with Ernest Major, a painter of the "Boston School." Heins received a bachelor of science in education in 1929.