Recording Southern New Mexico: The Botanical Drawings of Edward Skeats

Exhibition Website

Feb 3 2017 - May 13 2017

Edward Miall Skeats (1858 – 1928) was a chemist, a geologist, an engineer, and, according to his son, a pioneer at heart. He was also an amateur artist who recorded much of the plant life near what is now Carlsbad, New Mexico, in the late nineteenth and very early years of the twentieth centuries. Skeats’ son Arthur gave fifty-nine of his father’s watercolors to the University of New Mexico Art Museum in 1966. While a few of these images have been on exhibit here and at the Harwood Museum in Taos, this is the first time a significant number of them have been shown together in a solo exhibition.

Skeats’ keen observational skills were developed through his scientific background. Thus his works fall squarely in the genre of botanical drawings rather than botanical art which, as has been noted, focuses on a finished drawing or painting as its sole objective. Botanical drawings are visual records of species with scientific exactitude the goal. However, Skeats’ work clearly encourages aesthetic responses from its viewers

  • Works on Paper
  • American
  • Animals / Wildlife / Nature
  • Edward Skeats

Exhibition Venues & Dates