Anne Ophelia Todd Dowden, a botanical artist who wrote and illustrated a number of books and displayed her watercolors at museums and botanical gardens around the country, has died. She was 99.
Dowden died Jan. 4 in her sleep at Frasier Meadows Retirement Community in Boulder, Colo., according to Carolyn Crawford, a longtime friend.
A native of Denver, Dowden spent many years in New York City but returned to her home state in 1990. She was known for painting flowers, herbs and insects in precise anatomical detail, using only live blossoms as models. She also kept a large collection of beetles and bugs for her work, and once said she had spent six weeks painting the hairs on a bee's leg for one of her works.
Dowden obituary: An obituary about Anne Ophelia Todd Dowden that appeared in the California section on Friday gave the wrong date of her death. She died Thursday, not Jan. 4.
Several of her books won awards. "Look at a Flower" (1963) and "Wild Green Things in the City, A Book of Weeds" (1972) received awards from the American Library Assn. "The Blossom on the Bough, A Book of Trees" (1975) was named an outstanding book for children by the National Science Teachers Assn.
She also illustrated books written by others. "Shakespeare's Flowers" by Jessica Kerr (1969) and "Roses" by Louis Untermeyer (1970) are among her best-known collaborations.
House Beautiful, Life, Natural History and Smithsonian magazines published her illustrations. Her work was exhibited at the Smithsonian, the New York Public Library and the Denver Museum of Art, among other places.
"Anne Ophelia has got to be the country's leading botanical artist," James White, curator of art at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, which owns about 300 of Dowden's watercolors and drawings, said in an interview with The Times last year.
She decided to be an artist at age 5, but for many years she supported herself by teaching. She moved to New York City in her 20s and taught at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She later joined the faculty of Manhattanville College, where she was the founding chairwoman of the art department. She remained there until the early 1950s.
For 15 years, starting in the mid-1930s, she designed botanical-print wallpaper and drapery fabrics for the American Design Group, which she co-founded.
Drawings and watercolors remained a sidelight until Dowden was close to age 50. Then, "I finally combined hobby and profession and began the work I like best," she later recalled.
