Priscilla Susan Bury

Priscilla Susan Bury was born in Fairfield, Liverpool. She began to draw plants from her family's greenhouse and, by 1829, had enough studies of lilies and allied plants for publication. From 1831-1834, her drawings were published in A Selection of Hexandrian Plants[1]. The engraving was entrusted to the Londoner Robert Havell, engraver of the John James Audubon (1785-1851) plates. The book was carried out in aquatint and the 350 plant drawings painted in part by hand. The subscribers to this large folio numbered only 79, mostly from the Lancashire region, Audubon being one of them. The book was described as "one of the most effective colour-plate folios of its period" by Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt in his The Art of Botanical Illustration.[2]

She married Edward Bury (1794-1858), a noted railway engineer, on 4 March 1830. The couple had at least three sons, born between 1831 and 1835. Although she was not trained as a botanist or patronized as a professional artist[3], she was the author of several other scientific plant illustrations[4] including The Botanist of Benjamin Maund (1790-1863).[5]

• 
  Hippeastrum ×johnsonii
• 
  Lily in A Selection of Hexandrian Plants
• 
  Lilium canadense
• 
  Lilium brownii var. viridulum
• 
  Hippeastrum Striatum
• 
  E.F. Seedling Amaryllus, 1819. Minneapolis Institute of Art

• 1859: Recollections of Edward Bury, by his Widow (Privately published, Windermere)
• 1862: Figures of Remarkable Forms of Polycystins, or allied organisms, in the Barbados Chalk Deposit; drawn by Mrs. Bury. Windermere: John Garnett, [1862]

Works cited

• Brent Elliott (2001). Flora. Une histoire illustrée des fleurs de jardin. Delachaux et Niestlé (Lausanne): 335 p.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Priscilla Susan Bury.

• Saint Louis Art Museum General background. Image from Hexandrian Plants
• Edinburgh University Press
• A Selection of Hexandrian Plants
• Biodiversity Heritage Library Flickr