New England is known for its vibrant autumn foliage, and the orange, red, yellow, and purple hues that are revealed in the October woods have inspired many artists. One of those was Ellen Robbins, a native of Watertown, Massachusetts who achieved some measure of fame through her paintings of colorful wildflowers and fall leaves. A book of her work titled Autumnal Leaves is our Object of the Month.
The book, printed in 1868, features eighteen color plates of tree leaves painted in their fall colors. The one shown here depicts maple leaves in various shades of yellow, red, and green. A signature on the first free endpaper, “T.G. Appleton”, indicates it belonged to Thomas Gold Appleton, brother to Frances Appleton Longfellow and a well-known patron of Boston and New England artists.
Ellen Robbins became an artist at least in part due to necessity. Her father died in 1830 when she was only two years old, and to financially support the family she and her sisters took on work at an early age. Her aptitude for art was noticed by a cousin, who urged the family to send her to art school. In the late 1840s she took additional lessons from artist Stephen Salisbury Tuckerman, and by 1849 was exhibiting her work at the Studio Building at Boston, which led to sales and further opportunities to generate income as an artist.
In addition to giving painting lessons, Robbins began to sell her watercolor paintings of wildflowers in volumes that cost $25 each, a hefty sum that by some metrics is the equivalent today of over $750. Her work was acclaimed by many, with one critic writing that her work was so lifelike that “bees might light” on her paintings. In the late 1860s she was enlisted by lithographer Louis Prang to produce a series of flower and leaf paintings to be sold as prints. She also sold paintings through the Doll & Richards Gallery in Boston, founded in 1866 and frequented by Thomas Gold Appleton. Appleton may have purchased this volume there or have known about Robbins through his other extensive connections in the Boston art world, he and Robbins had many acquaintances in common.
Robbins wrote a series of articles about her life that were published in The New England Magazine in 1896, titled “Reminiscences of a Flower Painter”. She died in 1905.