page_title: Mary Battersby
section_title: Artistic work
hierarchical_section_title: Mary Battersby / Artistic work
caption_attribution_description: English: Mary Battersby Ring Plover
context_page_description: Mary Battersby or Miss Battersby was an Irish artist and naturalist.
context_section_description: The works of Battersby are all signed "Miss Battersby" or "M:Battersby". Her corpus is six albums of paintings, a record of one letter and two addresses. There is no other documents pertaining to her, and she does not appear to have exhibited at any time. While she is often described as a "flower painter", given her known work, her interest lay more in the observation of birds than botany. It is unknown if Battersby received any formal training in watercolours, though it was not uncommon for young women to receive such training. Though her ornithological work is described as strictly true to life and without extraneous details, though over the course of her work her style did not develop.
  The Royal Dublin Society received four volumes of drawings from Miss Battersby, the first in 1820, three in 1836 with a letter. These were Flowers drawn from Nature, Drawings from a collection of birds shot in Pennsylvania, North America by Robert Battersby Esq. MD, Native birds which were all shot in the County Meath, and Drawings taken from a collection of stuffed birds in the Dublin Museum. Another two volumes are in the Ulster Museum, one dated 1841 and the second undated. A small album is also in the collections of the National Library of Ireland, with studies of flowers, butterflies, insects and feathers, it has been suggested that this may have been produced by another member of the Battersby family, Frances Isabella Battersby. The volume of drawings of the stuffed birds from the Dublin Museum, now the Natural History Museum in Dublin, consists of life sized studies of the mounted birds in the museum. The studies were of exotic birds including hummingbirds.
caption: Painting of a Ringed Plover by Mary Battersby
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